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23.03.2024 - (10AM - 03PM) CREDIBLE EASTER:A CASE FOR THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST
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What is Christian Apologetics?

Why are people leaving the Christian faith?

While it’s true that some come back to the faith after temporarily wandering off, the majority, it seems, never come back. Let’s explore some of the most common reasons why Christians leave their faith.

Reason 1: Churches are Overprotective

As Christians living in the 21st century, we have unprecedented access to ideas and worldviews. Unfortunately, the church has failed to engage with the challenges to Christianity from the variety of ideas that exist in our culture. The church has a sort of ostrich mentality where you put your head in the sand and pretend that it is not really out there instead of engaging with it. Think about this! It would be a remarkable sermon, for example, where the pastor would say something like this: “Many biblical scholars think that this is not a historical narrative but is merely legendary.” And then begin to deal with that. Or if preaching on Genesis 1 were to say, “Now, there are certain data from population genetics that suggest that Adam and Eve could never have existed; that the human population never shrank below 2,000 individuals in the past.” The kids are hearing this in their biology class at school, and yet you never hear it in church. So, in that sense maybe they feel it is a kind of bubble or overprotective environment. This perhaps backfires because they hear these challenges anyway, and so the failure to acknowledge them and address them hurts their faith.

Reason 2: Churches come across as anti-science

This is predominantly found among young adults. One of the reasons they feel disconnected from church or from faith is the tension they feel between Christianity and science. The most common of the perceptions in this arena is “Christians are too confident they know all the answers”. Some feel that “churches are out of step with the scientific world we live in”. As a result, many science-minded young Christians are struggling to find ways of staying faithful to their beliefs and to their professional calling in science-related industries. For instance, there is a sort of unholy alliance between New Atheists and Young Earth Creationists that, if you think that the world is older than ten to twenty thousand years, you have somehow betrayed the Bible and contradicted the Bible. So, if you are convinced that those two are incompatible, that is to say an ancient world and the truth of the Scripture, then something has got to give and the church will come across as antagonistic to mainstream science. 

Reason 3: The Exclusive nature of Christianity held by Christians

This is the problem of religious pluralism. The idea that Christ and Christ alone is the way of salvation and the way to God is deeply offensive to people today. People think that we are narrow and bigoted and dogmatic and therefore are really immoral people.  I think what lies behind it is the cultural conviction that religious belief is not a matter of fact, it is a matter of taste or fashion, and therefore to say that your view alone is right is just an expression of bigotry and close-mindedness because you are simply saying that your tastes are the only right tastes – the only legitimate ones. People don’t think of religious belief as objective matters of fact. Therefore, this kind of exclusivity they find offensive, just as if I were to condemn your taste in music or your taste in clothing and say that my tastes alone are correct. If religious belief is just a matter of taste then these claims to exclusivity are indeed absurd and offensive. 

Reason 4: The Church is unfriendly to those who doubt.

People with Christian experience say the church is not a place that allows them to express doubts. They do not feel safe admitting that sometimes Christianity does not make sense. In addition, many feel that the church’s response to doubt is trivial. Some of the perceptions in this regard include not being able “to ask my most pressing life questions in church” and having “significant intellectual doubts about my faith”. In fact, intellectual scepticism is a major reason cited by those who have left.