I suppose this could also be called the "Christian to athiest pipeline", but that's actually less relevant to me, so we're sticking with what my beliefs are. That also means I'm going to focus primarily on Mormonism, as well, specifically the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This isn't a proper study or scientific article, but it's sort of a way to share my experiences with religion.
Content warning for mentions of religious sexual abuse (undescribed and towards not-me) and descriptions of my own religious trauma.
There's something I've noticed - a pattern of people who are born to Christian parents (of some sect or another), and then they grow up and eventually turn pagan (or athiest). And it's an interesting pattern, because the number is statistically significant.
In fact, in a study done by Pew Research Center, they show that religiously unaffiliated has been rising, especially in the younger generation. Now, 'religiously unaffiliated' inclused both agnostic and athiest individuals, but I'm not sure if it includes pagans (as that's not explicitly mentioned whether they are included or excluded - I just see that other massive world religions are). Still, it's telling - Christianity continues to shrink.
As someone who grew up as part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (also known as LDS or Mormon), I definitely have an idea of why Christianity and its various sects are shrinking.
My parents are both converts to the church. Both of my parents were raised Christian, and my dad has always been very staunch in his beliefs. He knows the Bible pretty damn well, although he's not as good with the Book of Mormon. My mom didn't have strong beliefs until she found the LDS church, and now her testimony is something she's decently eager to share with others. Although, of course, there's always the anxiety of sharing that testimony to proselytize - something all members are encouraged to do, although not to the point of irritating or upsetting someone.
When I was twelve and thirteen years old, there was an older girl in my young women's group. She wasn't Mormon, but she was gay, and looking for a place to belong. Back then, I never knew why she left.
Back in 2015, the LDS church created a ban on allowing the children of gay parents to be baptized until they were eighteen years old. This didn't change until 2019, and was a nail in the coffin of me leaving the church.
According to another Pew Research Study, only 49% of people are religiously "none" due to lack of belief.
"Only 49%? Shiloh, that's nearly half."
Yeah, it is, and that leaves another half who have left for another reason.
20% disliked organized religion, 18% are religiously unsure or undecided, and 10% are inactive believers. I imagine, among this 48%, there is some overlap. And lots of complicated feelings. I'm almost confident of this, in fact, because there's overlap and complicated feelings for me, too.
In some ways, the church was home and community for me. When my mother was in the hospital back in 2015, just a month or so after the announcement that the children of gay couples couldn't be baptized, people from my ward brought food over. For a few days, at least. When my dad lost his job for the third time, long before my mom's hospitalization, we got food from the church's food bank. We had people we could rely on.
When I came across my first sign that the Mormon church was not a bastion of righteousness - when I came across someone writing about their sexual abuse at the hands of a church authority - I refused to believe it. That was something Catholics did. Maybe it was another sect of Mormonism - the Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints, or others. You know, the wrong ones. People who were Mormon just did better.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that the church I grew up in also buried and hid abuse, and even tried to handle these cases without secular authorities such as the police. I found this fact out years after initially leaving - long after I first read one individual's account of the mishandling of their sexual abuse by a church authority figure. Turns out, it wasn't one individual. It was a systematic problem.
(Nobody ever wants to believe the people they love and trust could do something so horrible, but it always is people who are loved and trusted who do these things.)
The church has a policy that allows bishops to conduct one-on-one interviews with minors. It more than allows it; it requires it. It was a policy that I went through to get baptized, and later to be able to go into the temple. My bishops were very, very good, and nothing happened. I got candy and felt good and like I was a Good Mormon Girl™, with all the serotonin. It never crossed my mind that any sexual abuse would happen, or that anything inappropriate even could happen. I trusted the adults around me and I trusted the church.
And I am grateful for the fact that I could trust the adults, and grateful for the fact I was naive to some of the real horrors of the world.
But this one-on-one policy goes deeper than just interviews for being further entrenched into the church. It is something that happens when child sexual abuse happens by someone outside of the child's family, and sometimes even inside it. It is a place that allows a child to be interrogated about sexual abuse... or even sexually abused by the bishop.
And when the child leaves that room, nobody believes them, because the Bishop was called by God and is a good and pure man.
(Nobody ever wnats to believe the people they love and trust could do something so horrible.)
The Salt Lake Tribune calls the mass exodus of Mormons leaving the church a "canary in the coal mine" situation, and I can see why. The LDS church is full of community, love, support. While they say it's wrong to have a same-sex partner, they support gay people coming in the church. These days, according to my parents, there's lots of people talking about how to support LGBTQ+ children and family.
But that's still worlds different from the hypocrisy and exclusion that's actually practiced, the way someone without a queer child will wince at me, the way I'm told to be careful and not openly myself - openly nonbinary - when I do my mother a kindness and attend church with her. She doesn't want me wearing formal slacks to church, the way men do; she wants me wearing dresses and skirts only.
Baptist News has an article where someone went and interviewed ex-Christians from all kinds of places. Mostly, people fell into agnosticism, and atheism after that; but many other religions were given as an answer, including a solid 7% of the ex-Christians Brandon Flanery surveyed being pagans. Pagan like me.
The biggest answer in both the initial and final reasons for leaving were the way LGBTQ+ people were treated. The second biggest was the behavior of believers.
Growing up in Colorado, the Mormon church was filled with friendly people always willing to help out. They were kind to their neighbors, even their non-Mormon ones, and were some of the first volunteers to help with problems, secular and religious.
When I moved to Utah, the first time I attended our new ward, I felt judged. There was a distinct distance between myself and everyone else. The peace I normally felt when worshipping was completely absent. I only felt that peace again when we walked the grounds of the Salt Lake City Temple for Christmas, seeing all the lights and nativity scenes. Now, as the Compassionate Service leader, my mother struggles to get people to volunteer to help out - something that never happened back in my old wards in Colorado. Money was an issue in one of my wards, the poorer one, but they still helped in whatever ways they could; here, people just... don't.
The community I once had through the church is gone, and would have been gone even if I was still Mormon. Utah Mormons are a different breed - arrogant, stuck up, inconsiderate. But perhaps it's just a result of the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
I was taught that Mormons are special, that because we found the right church, we were the best. That we would be able to go to the Celestial kingdom when we died, and live in the best sphere. I myself took a certain amount of pride from knowing the worst of the worst wouldn't go to hell but the terrestial kingdom - a kingdom just like the modern-day Earth, with sin and suffering, but not to abjectly torture. Isn't it nice? I thought. Isn't it so much kinder than what other churches teach?
That sort of we're-special attitude goes even deeper: the sacred (not secret) garments, which out of respect for the people I love in the Mormon church I will not talk more about, the Temple, and especially as not every Mormon can enter, evne those of the right age; the teaching that one day, we too will become gods; Joseph Smith's vision and the way that that's taught; and none of the hypocrosies and problems of the church are ever taught, even though they're available to find. And they are available to find! Through official church sources, even!
They're just... hard to find.
In many ways, the internet is a threat to religion. It will never dismantle religion, and oftentimes it leads people from one religion into another. (I never would have become pagan without the internet). But it also allows for there to be community outside of a religious one. And it allows people to find information that before, could require a lot of buried research and becoming a social pariah.
Beyond the internet, there's always been plenty of religious migration. It has just become more prolific. Organized religion can no longer as easily hide its sins, especially the newer ones - like Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses, for example.
I personally left the Church of Jesus Christ for a lot of reasons:
- The policies towards LGBTQ+ people
- the contradictions and hypocrisy of certain aspects of the church
- the contradictions and hypocrisy of the Bible and the Book of Mormon
- past traumatic experiences innately tied with my time in the church
- stories of other people's struggles with the church
- having ignored the call of another god for a long time, and finally realizing she had been calling me
- historical tales of people who had been high up in the chain of command in the church
The final reason, however, I think is the most damning: I felt betrayed by God and His so-called people and followers, and realized that for all the claims to love and behavior of community and neighbors, there was fundamentally a lack of love.
That reason has a lot to do with the trauma I have from the church.
It's odd how so much of my time in the church is mixed with both intense love and intense trauma. There was so much kindness there, and I still adore most everyone I met and interacted with. I trusted those adults whole-heartedly, and few of them gave me a reason to not trust them.
Except for all the times they did, of course.
See, there was a lot of pressure for me to try new things. This pressure isn't inherently bad. Being pushed, gently, out of your comfort zone is a part of how you grow. Being physically taken by the shoulder by two adult women, surrounded by several of your slightly-older peers, and someone putting a BB gun into your hand when you don't want to shoot is not how you grow.
I was twelve years old when that happened. Later, I willingly went to a shooting range. It was just as awful as I remembered, but this time when I showed distress, I had someone take me out of the situation so that I could process and relax, instead of trying to show me how well I did when I was literally in tears and sobbing.
I don't like guns.
(The irony here, of course, is that I'm still pro-second Amendment and believe people should have access to guns - I do think there should be a reformation of gun control, but my ideas are equal parts more lenient and more strict depending on the circumstance.)
There were many times when I, undiagnosed except for depression and anxiety, would simply be unable to do something, and pushed to do it anyway. Told that I was being silly. Told that I was faking. Told that I was lazy. I often couldn't articulate why I couldn't, but some things were impossible for me. Sometimes they were things that I had done before, or would be able to do later, but there are still things I cannot do. Now, of course, I realize it was a mix of Autism, cPTSD (later on, when I was a teenager), and chronic fatigue syndrome - none of my symptoms were bad enough, especially when I was already fat, to get me diagnosed back then. The chronic fatigue syndrome is especially annoying, because I remember having symptoms of it as early as when I was twelve or thirteen, but told to stop making excuses and faking and being lazy to get out of things.
There was the time when I was twelve and told my mom I believed in all gods, and that God was like, Zeus or Ra or whatever the top-dog was in different mythologies, and that that's why there were supposed to be no others before Him. (I did not really understand anything outside of the main 7 religions, and honestly I'd argue I didn't understand anything beyond Christianity.) I remember, back then, that she pulled the car over into the Walmart parking lot, in an empty area, and she lectured me, getting angrier and angrier, until I sobbed and recanted my beliefs.
In summer 2014 or 2015, I got to do something called EFY, or "Especially For Youth". Normally, it was overnight, and at that time I had finally given up on spending nights away from home without my parents, as overnight things - besides Trek (where we walked the pioneer trails) - usually went poorly with no-one to advocate for my needs. However, this was a new type of program, or at least newly available in Colorado; just a daytime EFY.
There was a dress code, which was understandable. But I remember being puzzled by the fact you couldn't have dyed hair. Even if it was a natural color, if you had it dyed, you couldn't attend. You'd have to shave it all off or cut everything but the showing roots if you wanted to go.
There was a lot of discomfort there. I was in pain most of the time due to the chairs and hard floors; I could never sit comfortably because it was hosted in a school building, and those were uncomfortable enough, but we spent a lot longer there than in school each day. There were lessons that didn't sit easily with me; I remember taking notes for the first two days, and then I just... stopped. Something felt wrong on a fundamental level, but I was the only one who seemed bothered by it.
Primary - before I turned twelve years old - was fairly good. I don't have any negative memories, any trauma, back in this time. I struggled, in the way I always struggled, to make friends. I was the only girl my age, and in the last year or so of primary that meant I was isolated and the boys started to bully me. But I still had fun, and enjoyed the lessons.
It was in Young Woman's that I started to feel...
Puberty was difficult for me. Being called a woman was worse. Every time we spoke the theme, I would feel this painful prickling under my skin for the first sentence. Peace came over me for the rest of it, the feelings engaged that were common when I worshipped.
As a teenager, I also had the opportunity to attend other churches and their services. I felt peace there, too - the peace of love, the peace of God, I thought.
But it went beyond that. Symbols of religion have always filled me with peace; seeing people at peace with themselves, finding love through their god or gods, it brings me peace. The signs of the divine, that we are not alone, are inherently peaceful; knowing that not everyone with power is incorrigably corrupt is a comfort and an ease.
The peace I felt, the strength of what I thought was the Holy Spirit, was beyond that: it was a sort of peace I found through love and being loved, a sort of peace I felt when people had community, were cherished - when I had community and was cherished.
When I see a manger scene at Christmastime, I feel that sense of peace and love. The ideal there - that God so loved the world He sent his Son, who volunteered, to die for our sins - is a beautiful ideal. When I see a Star of David, I feel that sense of peace and love. I get excited to see holiday decorations that aren't Christian and secular holidays, because I know in the US it's an uphill battle to get those decorations set out. And there's that echo of peace.
If this sense of peace, of satisfaction, of love and perfection and harmony, did not come from God, then...
If the only way to get that peace was to suffer discomfort, was to understand I could never be accepted as my full and whole self - one who liked all genders, one who isn't a woman or a man, one who was queer - was to deal with doubts and uncertainties and stare at all of these flaws in the church, these flaws in God, and try to pretend like they didn't exist, to have refutations that never fully refuted it...
There was a better way.
I left the church. There are times I regret it. Times I miss the sanctity of God, the reassurance of being a divine child. But as an adult, before I left, I had callings. Callings I floundered in and struggled with, other than when I was called to work in nursery with kids. I was barely able to take care of myself, and I was expected to go and do. Bastet does not expect me to go and do; what she expects of me is to give what I can. Some days, that's cooking a meal with her in mind and honoring her with that, and playing with my cat, and taking a shower and cleaning things and giving offerings throughout my day. Other days, that's merely staying in bed and being grateful for the fact my cat is a cuddlebug and I am not alone.
When I doubt, I can sit with her. I sit on my bed in front of my alter, with a candle lit, and breathe deep and slow. I feel the sense of peace I felt at church. And there is a voice there, so similar to the still small voice I had with God and the Holy Ghost. It's not quite a voice. It's a feeling. I hear from her that she loves me, and that I am doing my best, and that I don't have to be a perfect follower; she called to me for a reason, and that me being myself is enough.
There's no 10% of my money going to a church. There's no not following the Gospel and losing access to one of the most holy places of worship. There's no requirement to only follow one god, or put a god above all others. The expectation is that I be kind and I try my best, however that best may be. And the holy places of worship are in my heart, in my home, in the room I make for them in my life.
I haven't asked for church records to remove my dead name. It is a process - the easiest method of QuitMormon.org has had many obstacles placed. But I have told my mom I don't want her to update that name. I know what them having that name, with my inactivity, means. Good neighbors sent over. People told to be encouraging of me coming.
I remember ding-dong-ditching cookies at inactive members' houses, and going for visits to try and encourage them to come to church. I don't want that. Mormon missionaries will be enough; I can offer them bottles of water and granola bars and send them on their way. I can remind them that there is a world beyond the church, and that kindness doesn't start and end with God.
There is so much to say about my experiences with Christianity. If God wasn't so hypocritical, I probably would have, still, eventually, left the church. If I hadn't seen the dark side of Christians...
It's odd to say I experienced persecution, but I did receive some bullying for my religion. The lightest was the claims that Mormonism wasn't a sect of Christianity, that it was a cult and it was evil. It was worse when those claims became that I was foolish or evil for believing and following it.
Other churches persecuted against gay people, many of which did so with talk of fire and brimstone as opposed to a demand they refuse to have love and partnership in their lives to be considered a worthy member of the church. (I think the way the LDS church does it is worse.) I always think of my cousins, two of my favorite people on Earth, who have been in a partnership since... before I was born, I think. A long time. A lifetime of being together. And I wonder how anyone can deny the love there, the care there, the way they care for each other.
But certainly if I hadn't experienced that, maybe I would have stayed a Christian, just gone to a different sect.
It's hard to say.
All I know is, part of my full self is being pagan, is worshipping Bast. Is, decidedly, not being Mormon - and making my own path outside of the bounds of organized religion.
Feel free to share your own stories in the comments below, or other articles and studies you might have on ex-Christians. I know I am missing a lot here; a lot of things I could say, a lot of data I could add... But I also feel my point comes across.
That being: Christianity professes to be about love, but the actions of God and His followers do not match up.