Why People Walk Away From the Church

It has been over three years since I last went to church.

I am not alone.

Around three and a half thousand believers walk away from the Christian Church every day in the USA. According to the online publication The Christian Century, an average of nine churches per day shut their doors for good in the USA.

Yet, according to Barna, over 70% of Americans still identify as Christians. It is a statistical anomaly that deserves some reflection. Why have so many professing Christians abandoned the institution that supposedly represents their belief system?

Many church leaders have convinced themselves that the mass exodus from their churches is somehow the fault of those leaving. They are back-sliders! Their faith is faulty. They are just trying to justify their sin! What they believe is misguided. And, to be honest, when your own job is at stake, it is understandable that you might deflect the blame away from yourself and the system that puts food on your table.

But facts are facts. Many Christians have lost faith in the church system, yet they have not lost faith in their God. They have embraced a different kind of Christianity — one that doesn’t include the institutionalized church.

Much has been written about this phenomenon, and as I have reflected on my post-church experience, I have come to some personal conclusions about factors that I believe contribute to the church exodus.

Attitudes to LGBTIQ+ community

A study by the Barna Group conducted among 16–29 year-olds asked non-Christians about their perception of Christians. The study explored twenty specific images related to Christianity, including ten favorable and ten unfavorable perceptions. Among young non-Christians, 9 out of the top ten perceptions were negative. 87% of those surveyed said Christians were judgmental, 85% said Christians were hypocritical, and 78% said Christians were out of touch. And today, the most common perception of Christians among non-believers is that Christians are anti-gay, with 91% of non-Christians saying they believe that Christians show excessive contempt and unloving attitudes towards homosexuals and make homosexuality a bigger sin than anything else.

There is plenty of evidence to support this view.

However, there are a growing number of Christians who not only sympathize with the LGBTIQ+ community but want to be supportive. It is difficult for such Christians to be perceived as supportive of their LGBTIQ+ friends while still attending the institution that condemns them. Sure, many churches these days may say, “We welcome members of the LGBTIQ+ community.” Still, when you get down to the details, you’ll find that they aren’t welcome to participate fully in the life of the church (in leadership positions, for example) and are treated as objects of suspicion and scorn, if not overtly, then just beneath a thin veneer of forced niceness and fake smiles.

The doctrines of sin and hell

When I grew up in the evangelical church, I was taught that hell was a literal place beneath the earth, where those who didn’t believe in Jesus would be punished for eternity. For those who went there, it would be a place of both psychological torment — at the knowledge that they had lost the opportunity for salvation — and physical ones inflicted by Satan and his band of evil minions.

From his lofty throne, God will look down and laugh at the suffering of the damned, said the English puritan Richard Baxter. “Is it not a terrible thing,” he asked, “to a wretched soul, when it shall lie roaring perpetually … in the flames of Hell, and the God of mercy himself shall laugh at them?”

As a teenager, this was a very powerful motivator. With the threat of hell hanging over me, I was very cooperative and compliant when it came to accepting Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and savior. And that’s the problem with the doctrine of hell. It has been used as a tool to manipulate and control behavior and elicit a certain kind of response.

Aside from this, many Christians are finding it increasingly difficult to square away the idea of a loving God, with the doctrine of eternal torment in the fires of hell. Personally, I have decided that if God is not more loving, gracious, compassionate, and merciful than I am, then he’s not worth following. And I wouldn’t send people to hell because they didn’t say they believed in me.

Finding a church that allows me to believe this without reprisal, well… that’s a challenge!

Church-prescribed political affiliation

Many Christians are uncomfortable with the marriage that seems to exist between the church and the conservative side of politics. It is a well-established fact that white, evangelical protestant Christians overwhelmingly supported Donald Trump and his presidency to the point where “Evangelical Christian” became a kind of synonym for “Trump Supporter.”

In my home country, Australia, I believe that the more progressive political parties often have ideas more aligned with the compassion and grace that Christianity is supposed to espouse, particularly in matters pertaining to welfare, foreign aid, equality, asylum seekers, and the environment. Yet, it is kind of an unwritten rule that Christians should vote for the conservatives.

Yes, I have had friends walk away from the church because they can’t reconcile why it supports political parties that turn refugees away and oppress the minority — and throws its support behind morally questionable candidates just because they happened to say they are a ‘Christian.’

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The rise of Christian nationalism

As US Christian author Shane Claiborne says, “American nationalism is its own civil religion, where America rather than Jesus is the center of attention. Like any religion, it has its own liturgy, saints, and holidays. It has its own religious symbols — the eagle, the flag, the red, white and blue. It has its own creeds — ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident….” It has its own ‘worship’ songs — like ‘God Bless the USA’ and ‘I’m Proud to be an American,’ both by Lee Greenwood. It even has its own theology — manifest destiny, the doctrine of discovery, and American exceptionalism.”

There is nothing wrong with being patriotic. But, when you mix radical patriotism with conservative Christian faith, you somehow end up carrying the view that the “American way” is also God’s way, and so you must do what you can to impose that ‘way’ on the rest of the world.

When Christianity meets American exceptionalism, you end up with some truly repugnant attitudes — ones that say, “We have the truth. You don’t have the truth. You need what we have. You are lost. We are saved. You are walking around in the dark. We are enlightened. You need to learn from us. You have nothing of value to say to me, but what we have to say to you is of infinite value. My way of living and believing is the one true and correct one, and I will not be told otherwise.”‘

Many Christians recognize this kind of expression of “Christian faith” for what it is — pure idolatry. They are left with no choice but to step away from the institutional church and make their own way in the world.

After all, the Bible doesn’t say, “God Bless America,” but it does say, “For God so loved the world.”

Systematic sexism, misogyny, and misuse of power

Yes, believe it or not, gender equality is not a thing in many churches. Many churches use obscure biblical texts removed from their cultural context and apply them to modern 21st-century Church. “I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority” (1 Timothy 2:12) is a favorite of the gatekeepers of the misogynist boy’s club that is church leadership.

Don’t get me wrong… there are certain Biblical laws that should be applied verbatim — Moral laws like “Thou shalt not steal” is a good example. But, when you take cultural law that is clearly intended for particular culture in a particular place at a particular time and apply it to now, you end up becoming an oppressor. Or, as my theology lecturer used to say, “If you take a text out of context, you’re left with a con.”

I remember at my last church at a board meeting (all men, of course), there was a decision that needed to be made that required some legal advice.

“What a pity we don’t have any lawyers who come to our church that we can ask,” said one of the board members.

“My wife is a lawyer,” I spoke up.

“True,” replied the board member, “What a shame she is the wrong gender.”

Sorry, but I won’t be taking my daughter to a church where they are treated as second-class citizens in the Kingdom of God.

The church is unfriendly to those who doubt

According to James Fowler’s Six Stage of Faith Development, doubt and disillusionment are, in fact, signs of spiritual growth rather than spiritual decline. Many Christians go through a period of deconstruction where they test and challenge the doctrines that they have been taught as fact. They ask difficult questions like:

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If God is so good, why do bad things happen?
Why do there seem to be contradictions in the Bible?
What happens to people who never heard about Jesus?

And so on… However, legitimate questions get dismissed in many conservative churches with pat — and often trite — answers. We treat people who are expressing their reasonable doubts as if they are backsliders. Take this tone-deaf and insensitive Instagram post from The Gospel Coalition, lambasting people who go on a deconstructive journey:

This is typical. Many Christians mistakenly believe that faith is having no doubts about a certain set of beliefs. However, genuine faith is not the absence of doubt. Instead, it is continuing in spite of our doubts. In fact, without church, faith is redundant. The church must allow space for reasonable doubt within its walls and simply get better and handling the tension that comes with difficult questions.

God’s not there

In yet another Barna study, one of the top answers given to the question, “Why don’t you attend church,” was simply, “I find God elsewhere.”

Fair enough.

In amongst all the endless activity, prayer meetings, potluck suppers, and performance-based religion where we are constantly told we are doing it wrong and we need to get better, who could blame anyone for not finding God?

Personally, I find God in the cool of the morning, with a good cup of coffee in my hand, as the rising sun warms my face. I find God in the company of good friends. I find God in the laughter of my children — probably more than I’ve ever found him in the institutionalized church.

What next for the church?

Good question.

One thing is for sure, in fifty years, the church in the West will either not exist, or it will look very different from what it does now.

I suspect it is the latter because I still believe the promise of Jesus in Mattchurch — that He will build his church and not even the gates of hell will prevail against it. But, I think the Church that Jesus was talking about was a life-giving transformational community, not an institution, a system, or a building.

In the meantime, what do we make of the Evangelical Exodus? Perchurcht is the wake-up call the church needs. Perhaps the Church crisis we are experiencing is an incredible opportunity to rediscover and renew what we have lost. Perhaps the exodus is the beginning of the long and difficult journey — from slavery to freedom — to find the Promised Land.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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