Bad questions can sink a good survey. In this case, “Why did you leave Christianity?”
A Baptist researcher, Brandon Flanery, wanted to know why so many people are leaving Christianity. He starts with a startling number: According to the highly respected Pew Research Institute, Christians have dropped from 90% of the U.S. population to 64% in just fifty years. The trend is so profound that it’s all over social media, with hashtags like #exevangelical being viewed over a billion times on TikTok.
Mr. Flanery wanted to know why, so he conducted his own survey of 1,200 ex-Christians. He reached some very interesting conclusions. My favorite statistic? Twenty five percent of respondents – one in four – said that LGBTQ issues were the primary reason they abandoned Christianity! That gives me hope for our society.
But Flanery missed the point. His own data shows that his analysis is wrong.
Flanery forgot to ask: Is Christian theology correct? Had he asked that question, his results would have been vastly different. Instead, he asked a bunch of sub-questions, like “Purity culture,” “Afterlife,” and “Scriptural issues.”
Let’s start with Flanery’s original data:
Interesting stuff for sure, and I appreciate all the work Flanery did. It must have been a huge effort to collect and analyze answers from 1,200 people. (Note that the numbers add up to more than 100%, presumably due to people citing more than one reason.)
But here’s where, in my opinion, Flanery went wrong: a bunch of these are really sub-categories of a much larger question, “Is Christian doctrine correct?” From what I can see, a bunch of Flanery’s reasons are just different ways of saying, “I left because Christian doctrine is just wrong.”
Admittedly, I can’t say for sure exactly what Flanery meant with his one- to three-word graph labels, so I just made my best guess. That said, I’d wager that even if I included a couple that I shouldn’t have, or missed one or two that I should have included, my main point would still be valid. Here’s what I broke out from Flanery’s chart:
Each one of these things is a direct claim about Christian doctrine. “Theological issues” and “Scriptural issues” are obviously part of Christian doctrine, but so are less obvious items like “Unanswered prayers” and “Afterlife.” They’re all direct teachings of Christianity. Others, like “Behavior of believers,” can’t be directly attributed to Christian beliefs, so they stand on their own.
Now if we coalesce these sub-category rows of data into one, called “Christian Doctrine is Wrong,” we get a much more interesting result. Here is my version of Flanery’s chart:
As you can see, almost half of ex-Christians left because they just don’t believe it any more. And that’s the real lesson from Flanery’s study.
Charts by the author from Brandon Flanery’s data.
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