These stories have shown that there are a number of ways of supporting Christians who make steps towards de-conversion, but in almost every single case it appears that the doubt that led to de-conversion came from within the individual.

Here’s the only story I found among the one hundred and seventeen I examined that credited de-conversion to the specific intervention of an atheist:

I ran into a very good friend and told him the story of my conversion. He was not critical, but kept asking questions about why I took to this religion and specifically required that I put things in my own words instead of mouthing what I had been told. He made me think! and that’s all it took.

We can tell people that there are alternatives to Christianity, and for many people who chafe at the stupidity of religion yet are unable to properly express it, this is liberating. We can raise questions about the dogma, hypocrisy, or the illogical beliefs of religion, but most people who cited these as factors, raised the questions themselves.

In addition, we must defend science and rationalism from attacks, especially in education. As we saw from earlier examples, fundamentalist Christians have to wage war on science. They have correctly identified that their beliefs either need to accommodate a rational understanding of reality, or they have to destroy or discredit rational identity in the eyes of their followers.

However, as atheists, we delude ourselves if we think that we have some kind of role in “shaking up” peoples faith even though we can provide the resources to support people trapped in the religious paradigm. Ultimately a person has to liberate themselves from religion, it is not for us to assume the role of atheist proselytes.

- Originally published by Kieran Bennett, reprinted with permission.

“One day, I was praying and suddenly it struck me that I was talking to myself.”

The following examples are from the 8.51% of the de-conversion stories, amongst the sample I read, in which people tried to speak to god, and they now credit god’s lack of an answer for their de-conversion.

“Being very eager to please, I would often beg Jesus to save me. Expecting trumpets and angels, or at the very least a pat on the head, and getting nothing, I think I just eventually realised god wasn’t going to answer.”

For some the experience of god failing to answer their prayers as promised was a highly distressing experience:

In high school, I gradually started to question more, but did not get satisfactory answers. My prayers for clarity and a stronger faith went unanswered. Why would God let my faith slip? That was the question that haunted me for years.

Others simply felt ridiculous:

I got older, I realized that I was supposed to be getting more out of it. Or some people, apparently, were. So, I tried praying on my own. At no point did I ever feel anything other than stupid for doing that — the way a person might feel if they attempted to hold a conversation with a doorknob!

Or perhaps disappointed:

I remember when I was very young and I heard for the first time that “whatsoever ye ask for, ye shall receive” line. I prayed really long and hard one night for a pony. I awoke and looked out my bedroom window, fully expecting to see a pony waiting for me in the yard. That was my first “clue.”

Religionists will make all form of excuses for the failure of prayer, but the fact is that a religion that centres around talking to god makes the implicit promise that god is listening. Prayer is important to many Christians, and undermining it might seem tempting to many activist atheists. However, once again it seems that people who came to these sorts of realisations did so on their own accord.

- Originally published by Kieran Bennett, reprinted with permission.

Surprisingly, as the following examples highlight, rarely was it Richard Dawkins ramming logic down someone’s throat with something like The God Delusion that resulted in de-conversion. De-conversion appeared to occur when people didn’t have their religiously trained defenses up. And again, it could happen at a young age:

When I was in 8th grade, I was studying my cousin’s biology book, which happened to teach evolution. I remember hearing things about how evolution was “incorrect” according to the sometimes Christian media. I did not completely dismiss the idea of god at this time, but it caused me to invalidate the idea of an actual organized religion because they were inelastic and unable to accept change or new ideas because their “holy” scripture was infallible. This was the beginning of my de-conversion to atheism.

Simple facts, and simple doubts. It did not even have to be evolution, something as simple as a scouting trip can provoke doubt:

I heard that the the world was only 10,000 years old, and that dinosaurs and people used to frollick together (probably mostly people running away from dinosaurs!), and how God intentionally (deceptively) made the fossil record to look like it was millions of years old so as to make blind faith necessary. Maybe the average Fundamentalist might have accepted this at face value, but I had always had a healthy respect for knowledge obtained through science. So, this was a bit of a tall order … I went to a big backwoods summer camp in New Mexico, called Philmont Scout Ranch, with my Scout troop. There, I learned about the Tooth of Time, an igneous mountain which dated back several millions of years.

And for the above de-convertee, doubt set in. Science engenders a different way of looking at things, using observable reality and deduction instead of blind faith. It’s not just the hard sciences either, this story relates how a person deciding to look at religion ever so briefly, through the lense of sociology, led to an epiphany:

The change came because of humanities class. We had to do experience logs, and one option was to visit a church and do a report. I wondered, what it would be like for someone doing that assignment and attending my church for the first time. So, one mass, I sat there, and did not participate. I immediately noticed how hard it was to do that. My mouth almost moved by itself to say the prayers along with everyone. And that’s when I realized how close to chanting everyone sounded. Nothing has scared me that much sense that moment when I realised I was the member of a cult.

Science led these people to doubt their religion. They came to realise their religion contradicted reality, and that one of the two had to be false.

- Originally published by Kieran Bennett, reprinted with permission.

Religions other than Christianity exist. These religions have existed and competed for followers for the entire history of religion, but this seems to be something that some Christian de-convertees reported being shocked about. They had been taught by their faith how special and how singular they and their beliefs were, and as a result, stumbling across the realisation that many religions were just like theirs caused deep doubts for 8.5% of the sample I read.

Consider the following examples:

• In English class we were reading a book about ancient mythology. I thought to myself, “If everyone thinks of these people’s beliefs as a crock now, I wonder how our society’s beliefs will look to people in 2 or 3 thousand years. Hmmm.”

• I studied Sociology in college, and I began to realise that the Christian Religious tradition was not in any way different from any other religion. All the “Pagan” religions that we were taught were not the true way to heaven were exactly the same as Christianity

• The revelation happened while reading the “Upanishads” on a bus to work. I realised that the Hindu religion made as much sense and was just as convincing (or unconvincing) as Christianity was. So why choose Christianity? The answer is, you don’t. It is foisted on one by social pressure.

It seems that if Christian churches want to keep pushing the exclusive, remarkable, or otherwise special nature of their beliefs before the beliefs of all others, they will need to continue making efforts to dissuade followers from examining the beliefs of other religions. The risk is not just that they might convert, but that they might realise that one is as valid as another. If these religions are as valid as another, then they are not special, exclusive or remarkable, and are thus discredited.

But again, these stories are about people who found out about other religions incidentally. They did not have their religiously trained guard up, because have no doubt that religions teach their followers to reject other ideas out of hand, as the second story indicates.

- Originally published by Kieran Bennett, reprinted with permission.

But pedophile priests, church leaders blowing money on yachts and a luxurious lifestyle, or the existence of something like the Vatican bank – surely these were the things that would shake people’s faith in large numbers. However, only 8.51% of people in the sample attributed their de-conversion to the hypocrisy of the church.

Personal experience highlighted the hypocrisy of religion to this person:

I began immediately to see hypocrisy in both the organizations and the individuals with whom I associated. I married a man in seminary studying for the ministry but I knew from the outset that his heart was not in what he was doing and he was just there because his minister father had pushed him into it. I am still married to this man after 35 years and I still love him but I noticed a great unhappiness in him.

And here’s another person who discovered religious hypocrisy through personal experience:

The thing that confused me the most, was the fact that since my family did not go to church, they were considered more evil than my friend’s parents who beat the tar out of him when my friend didn’t clean his room.

Both the unexpectedly low number of people who cited church hypocrisy as their reason for de-converting, and the fact that personal experience of hypocrisy was a common thread amongst those people, lead me to a theory. Churches seem vulnerable to simple questions about the nature of the universe or reality, stating “it’s a faith matter” is not a strong defence when matters of doctrine contradict clearly observable reality. However, Churches appear to have developed strong defences to charges of hypocrisy. Claims of “we’re being persecuted by outsiders” are a strong way of countering worries about church practice from among the faithful. That is of course, unless a religious person sees the hypocrisy with their own eyes.

- Originally published by Kieran Bennett, reprinted with permission.

To date, we’ve discussed Why d-C? – Answer the damn question Mr. Priest! and Why d-C? – Logical Problems with the Dogma.

Billboards exhort us to “read your bible”, and perhaps it’s a good idea. For 10.63% of people in the sample, reading the bible was significant in ending their faith. For some de-convertees the bible demonstrated how little their present religion had to do with the holy text that it supposedly revered.

Consider one person’s experience when quite young:

I had to fill out a worksheet about what the teen-age Jesus did after he woke up in the morning, rolled up his mat (like a good fundamentalist child) and went out to help his father in the carpenter’s shop. When I went back to the bible and saw that no one knows what happened [in those years of Jesus' life].

A simple “learning” activity prompted the above Christian to question their faith. If the church was feeding them simple lies about the life of Jesus, what else could it be lying about? The very nature of biblical morality perhaps? Christians often promote the idea of the morality of our society being derived from the bible, and the ten commandment’s in particular. But this is the response one Christian had upon reading the old testament:

I had never read the Old Testament before this. Where was the loving God I had been brought up with? Why did these great prophets seem like nothing more than raving street corner lunatics? What was up with this racial supremacy?

Again this person was forced to doubt their beliefs, when they realised that their church’s teachings were not derived from god, or some holy book, but were instead socially and historically constructed.

The road signs, the evangelists and the preacher’s encourage people to “read your bible” to “hear the good news”, but what this leading cause of de-conversion demonstrates is that if for some reason a person wanders into the bible unguided, they might uncover some uncomfortable truths about their religion. There was no evidence in the de-conversion stories to indicate that atheists, or people promoting de-conversion led people to read the bible without their Christianity tinted glasses.

- Originally published by Kieran Bennett, reprinted with permission.

But it’s not just questions about dinosaurs, or the world outside the religious paradigm that can provoke doubt. Many de-converted Christians spoke about realising the contradictions within the dogma itself. De-conversion stories that spoke of a realisation that the religious dogma was internally incoherent amounts to 12.76% of the sample. The most common cause of these doubts appeared to be when the religious dogma contradicted “religious” values (the reason for using scare quotes here will become apparent later).

This example shows conflict between a child’s own belief they have done nothing wrong (sin requires wrongful action), and the idea of original sin:

“When a boy 10 years old in Catholic school Priest pointed at the Cross and said “You put him there. He died for your sins,” I did not accept that statement. I was not old enough to have sinned!”

Here a de-convertee notes how as a young person she noticed the contradiction between a god who required constant praise, with the idea of an all powerful, all seeing, all caring god:

Around the age of 12, though, I had seriously starting doubting the existence of an entity such as God, who had such a big ego to be praised with zillions of chants — in spite of being omnipotent — and whose only desire was to get all to pray and accept his dominion, to be hapless before him. You needed to pray to deserve a happy life. Far from strength, I started seeing a marked weakness added to the contradictions in the mythology.

God was petty, and petty was not perfect. The doubt in the mind of this individual was sown.

Another person highlights the conflict between original sin and personal values concerning innocence:

We had religious instruction for two hours every day. At one point we were covering Purgatory. The nun explained that babies who were not baptised could not enter heaven, they carried the eternal sin and had to stay in Purgatory. I found that so very unjust that it started me questioning everything. I quit going to church.

Another example:

I couldn’t accept that homosexuality was inherently evil. I was not prepared to believe that a two-day-old foetus was somehow sentient and thus had a soul. I did not really accept any longer that people who dabble in the occult are possessed by demons and so on.

Religionists may contend that we get our values from the bible, or from their dogma. But what these de-conversion stories demonstrate is that values and morals are socially derived. These individuals encountered their first doubts about religion when the moral consequences of the religious dogma clashed with their socially derived values. There is the child who held that babies could not be guilty of anything clashed with the notion of original sin, and the adult who’s gut instinct was that all people were worthy of respect, even if they were gay. These individuals faced the choice of either modify their values to suit the church, or reject the church.

What does this mean for supporting de-conversion? Again, these individuals encountered these conflicts within the Church. The absurdity of the church’s beliefs was not pointed out to them by some atheist proselytiser, but inadvertently by the church itself.

- Originally published by Kieran Bennett, reprinted with permission.

There appeared to be several broad and recurring factors among these de-conversion stories. In this series, I will consider these broad reasons for de-conversion, how common they appeared to be amongst my sample, and what it might mean in terms of tactics for those wanting to support or even promote de-conversion.

Dissatisfaction with the answers to simple questions proffered by the religion was the most common reason cited for de-conversion amongst the sample (14.89%). Priests, prosletyers, Sunday school teachers, and religious parents are one of the most common triggers for de-conversion. When a figure representing the religion (in the mind of the person asking a question), offers an absurd answer to that question, the asker starts to doubt.

Children ask questions, and many de-convertees spoke of their first doubt’s arising when they were children asking simple questions, and getting stupid answers. They can be mind numbingly simple questions about everyday issues, as we see in this story:

“At 6 I was in church playgroup and I asked why they never shut the church door. The answer was a burglar would never steal for God because God will make him pay. I said but some one will steal I know this. They ignored me, so I asked and asked again. I realised they were telling lies and I simply thought this is all rubbish and never went back.”

Or they can be the sorts of questions that Dawkin’s himself would be proud of:

“Where the universe came from?”
The teacher responded: God.
I then stated: Where did God come from?
She responded. “We just have to accept that he was always here, and not question it.”
I am now 37 years old, but I can remember clearly my feelings about this comment. Utter disappointment. It seemed to me, even at only 9, to be a statement that violated logic. Why couldn’t she answer such a simple question?

Unsatisfactory answers in defence of a religious belief can be offered by practically anyone in order to raise doubts in the mind of people likely to reject religion in this way:

I was arguing with about eight to nine Christians in the library and I asked, “If God created the world in seven days, why are there dinosaur fossils?” They all had different answers; the worst was when one guy said that people made up fossils to discredit religion.

So what could this mean for supporting de-conversion? In every de-conversion story I encountered that cited the inability of a religion to answer a question satisfactorily, the question arose from that individuals involvement with the religion. They asked an innocent question of a preacher, or a parent, or a sunday school teacher, and recieved an incoherant or illogical answer.

The questions were not put to them by atheists. Access to resources from a skeptical, scientific or atheistic standpoint that addressed these sorts of questions aided in de-conversion. There does seem to be a role for supporting de-conversion in this instance, but the doubt that leads a person to seek out information that was not authorised by the religion arose from these young individuals own natural encounters with the religion. Only one of the de-conversion stories of this nature spoke of encountering an atheist who put questions about religion into their mind.

It’s not surprising really. Religions would cease to exist if they did not develop defence mechanisms when encountering people attempting to engender disbelief in the religion.

- Originally published by Kieran Bennett, reprinted with permission.