Over the years, I’ve heard many, many accusations about the causes of my deconversion. It could practically be a religious genre by now: Cold-reading attempts to guess strangers’ motivations regarding religious choices. But only one thing actually caused my deconversion. Strangely, Christians never light upon that one. Today, I’ll share their accusations—and what actually caused my faith pool to drain forever.

(A word about terminology: An ex-Christian is someone who has entirely deconverted from Christianity. They no longer believe Christian claims. Deconstruction runs along similar lines, but doesn’t necessarily result in full deconversion. Disaffiliation is disengagement from Christian community and ending one’s use of previous religious labels. In today’s example, I am an ex-Christian.)

(This post first went live on Patreon on 12/10/2024. Its audiocast lives there too and should be available by the time you see this!)

How Christian accusations work

In almost all flavors of Christianity, Christians learn that their own flavor’s particular take on religion is perfect in every way. Its god is perfect. Likewise, its doctrines, message, and social systems are perfect. Therefore, their flavor of Christianity works as advertised for every human who has ever existed.

This sets up a two-sided equation:

The flavor of Christianity and the person following that flavor

When the flavor is considered perfect but someone says it didn’t work for them, the only way to explain that situation involves a personal failure somehow on the right side of the equation. That particular person didn’t do Christianity correctly somehow. Perhaps they simply misunderstood the rules. Maybe they couldn’t or didn’t want to follow those rules due to some personal flaw of their own.

Once that error is put to rights, then the equation flows smoothly once again. That may be why Christian accusations are so simplistic, as well; each implies a solution to that simple problem. And once an ex-Christian puts that simple solution into play, nothing hinders them from reconverting!

Today’s topic involves the accusations taking place on the right side of our equation. The flavor represented by the equation’s left side cannot ever be criticized or found at fault.

It is also, by wild coincidence, the exact flavor that the accuser tends to hold as true. Who’d ever have imagined, right? Indeed, the types of Christians who’d throw the following accusations strictly follow the definition of TRUE CHRISTIANITY™. To them, TRUE CHRISTIANS™:

  1. Embrace basically the same package of beliefs that the accuser believes
  2. Haven’t gotten caught doing anything the accuser thinks is completely off-limits
  3. Dies in the traces with the first two points intact

Obviously, that last one comes into play when judging ex-Christians. No matter how well the first two points applied to ex-Christians during their time in the religion, if they deconvert then all three points immediately apply to their case.

And a note about cold reading and the Forer effect

You’ll also notice a certain element of cold reading in the following accusations. Cold reading is a skill utilized by conjobs of all sorts: Faith healers, so-called psychics and mediums, even street hustlers. It’s done by shrewdly observing cues to make semi-educated guesses about marks’ personal lives. Correct guesses grant the conjobs trustworthiness and credibility, which they use in turn to get power or money from their bamboozled marks.

Almost all of us radiate personal cues without even realizing it. Cues radiate out from our clothes, our facial expressions, our body language, our mannerisms, and much more. Many cues aren’t subtle at all. So as long as the marks don’t know what cold reading is, it can be tremendously effective.

Once the marks are suitably impressed, the conjobs hint that their god revealed this information via divine communication. Ta-da! Instant credibility for both the conjobs and their religion! Conversions galore! Hooray Team Jesus!

Alas, that’s not usually how cold reading actually works in this context. The sorts of Christians who fling deconversion accusations aren’t really good at discernment. Ironic, considering they consider discernment a spiritual gift from Yahweh! So cold reading backfires spectacularly on them.

(When the conjobs actually have access to information about their marks that the marks don’t realize they have, that’s called warm or hot reading. Peter Popoff famously used this technique in his faith-healing scams.)

Another form of manipulation used by accusers involves the Forer effect. Also called the Barnum effect (after P.T. Barnum, the circus showman), it occurs when conjobs describe their marks in vague, often contradictory descriptions that could apply to literally anybody. The marks perceive these descriptions as particular and specific to themselves. Just like cold reading does, this trick makes marks far more likely to give the conjobs what they want.

Astrologers and evangelists alike love the Forer effect. And I can see why. If I told ten random people that sometimes they feel really lonely, even when lots of people are around them, I bet at least nine of them would be shocked at my insight.

Deconversion Accusation #1: I didn’t believe exactly the right doctrines

Though most of my list today isn’t in any particular order, I’ll start with the two most common accusations I’ve heard over the years. And of those two, the most common of all is that I simply didn’t believe the right doctrines.

The right doctrines, of course, are always whatever package of beliefs my accusers believe. If they know I was Oneness, they claim my lack of belief in the Trinity caused my deconversion. If they know I was Pentecostal, they blame speaking in tongues as the reason. I’ve even run into mainline Protestants who were certain it was evangelicalism itself that caused my deconversion. Likewise, literalists always think it’s a lack of literalism that causes deconversions—while non-literalists think it’s literalism.

Here’s a Creationist blaming deconversions on non-Creationist beliefs:

Young people are not getting solid, Bible-based answers to the skeptical questions of this day; and many are leaving the church and turning to atheism or some vague idea of “spirituality” as a result.

And here’s a Christian making a bold claim about ex-Christians (emphases, as always, in the original):

Pretty much all of them believed in some works-based theology. You know, follow the 10 commandments, do deeds to get blessed or receive from God or to keep righteousness, therefore didn’t understand the Gospel because they still had the Veil over their eyes.

He also erroneously thinks once someone is a TRUE CHRISTIAN™ like himself, they would need to be “deluded and so utterly stupid to go back.” So he’s a really loving, Jesusy guy all the way around.

In the end, it always comes down to this: If I’d only believed exactly what the accusers believe, I’d never have deconverted. And, of course, this accusation comes with a resolution: If I’d embrace whatever my accusers believe, I’d reconvert.

But people deconvert in every flavor of Christianity. Particular belief packages don’t seem to have much to do with deconversion. Higher numbers of truth claims in an overall belief package might increase the odds of deconversion. In such flavors, there are simply so many more opportunities for truth claims to be found false. However, even in flavors making low numbers of truth claims we find plenty of deconversions.

So I do not regard my particular package of beliefs as the cause of my deconversion. Even at the time, I knew about plenty of other flavors. I didn’t feel tempted to join any of them afterward.

Deconversion Accusation #2: I wasn’t fervent enough

Easily the second-most-popular accusation is an attack on my fervor as a Christian. Judges assume that I must not have taken my faith very seriously, because if I had then I’d never have deconverted! From the very beginning, attacks on my fervor have been a popular—if utterly wrong—bit of cold reading.

And I see it’s still popular, particularly among evangelicals. These judges have thus decided that ex-Christians are “nominal Christians” or “cultural Christians” or whatever else they can dream up to condescendingly accuse apostates of a lack of strong faith and devotion. One atheist calls this accusation “one of the most presumptive and obnoxious” ones out there.

A couple of years ago, someone trotted this accusation out on Reddit:

There have always been non-Christians. Globally, most people. But were you once a true-believer and then left? [. . .] I think “always marginal” Christians are the bulk of this trend.

As others pointed out in that thread, though, none of this is what ex-Christians themselves see happening. Plenty of Christians disaffiliate from church culture and become what I call churchless believers. Plenty of others leave one flavor of Christianity, then join another, too. That’s what the accuser had done!

But when someone actually deconverts, actually stops feeling belief, actually rejects Christianity, it’s almost always after taking the religion very seriously.

It still makes me laugh to notice that these accusers generally don’t take Christianity as seriously as I did when I was Christian. When I believed, I almost chased Christianity into an actual cult in Waco. I tried my absolute best to follow Jesus’ commands. I even thought I loved Jesus and he loved me back. For that matter, my entire marriage to Biff wouldn’t have happened if I’d taken Christianity less seriously. Nor would most of the harebrained things I did as a Christian.

No, my fervor became a necessary prerequisite to my deconversion. The problem I had was the exact opposite of a lack of fervor.

Deconversion Accusation #3: I was rebellious

In Christianese, rebelliousness covers a lot of ground. It means disobedience to the rules set by a particular set of religious leaders who pretend to speak for Jesus. In evangelicalism in particular, when those leaders say “jump,” they expect the flocks to ask only, “how high?” If the flocks don’t jump, that’s rebellion.

But rebellion is far more than simple disobedience. It’s setting one’s own desires and convictions above what those religious leaders say that Jesus has decreed. Rebellion is nothing less than a person’s ambition to become their own god—or as one reconvert put it, “the captain of my own ship.”

And to paraphrase the Bard, by that sin fell the angels.

Rebellion can look like feminism, liberal politics, refusal to support the evangelical side of the culture wars, and more. It can also be the opposite of all of those. It can likewise look like a refusal to remain in denominations and churches that actively hurt people with no repercussions, as well as a refusal to attend any churches at all if a safe, functional one cannot be found.

In a lot of ways, any principled, thought-out rejection of the accuser’s belief system can be called rebellion.

Since literally anyone can be rebellious simply by rejecting an accuser’s beliefs or social stances, I don’t regard rebellion as the cause of my deconversion. To the contrary, my desire to be as Jesusy and obedient as possible became, like my fervor, a necessary prerequisite to it.

Every one of us is, in fact, the captain of our own ship. But I didn’t deconvert to get that.

Deconversion Accusation #4: I “just wanted to sin”

I separated this accusation from the previous one because it merits special attention. When Christians accuse ex-Christians of “just wanting to sin,” they almost always mean “have unapproved sex.” Evangelicals in particular like this accusation and always have—and as far back as I can remember, it’s always meant off-limits sex without the burden of unconfessed sin and disobedience to Jesus.

Who knows? It’s a big world. Maybe someone’s gotten that accusation as it relates to, say, cheating on one’s taxes or wearing off-limits clothes or cursing or working on Sundays. But I think it must be rare—if it ever happens.

Perhaps this one meaning is foremost on accusers’ minds because they know how powerful sex and sexual attraction can be, or perhaps they use their religion to demonize their own sexual urges. Perhaps believers see ex-Christians getting into relationships post-deconversion that they, as Jesus’ self-appointed judges and accusers, don’t like—and worse, not caring what judgmental Christians think of those relationships.

Whatever their reasoning, I’ve never heard this accusation in relation to anything else.

Christians accuse atheists in particular of “cling[ing] to the impossible and dismiss[ing] the undeniable,” as one site claims. They lament that wanting to sin makes evangelism impossible! These are the real iron chariots, folks!

I can 100% guarantee that no desire to sin existed in me at the time of my deconversion. I wasn’t elated at the possibilities of off-limits sex. Rather, I was absolutely emotionally wrecked and seeking only comfort and reassurance from Jesus. And these days, I can also assure my accusers that my sex life probably looks way less “sinful” than their own.

Deconversion Accusation #5: I didn’t want to be accountable to Yahweh

This one you will hear Christians talk about often in their spaces. They’re obsessed with imagining ex-Christians wanting zero accountability to anyone. One site puts it plainly:

Nothing in this world will sway someone resolutely determined to live without any externally imposed constraints.

Norm Geisler also leveled this accusation at those who rejected his control-grabs:

Although few would admit it, our rejection of religious and moral truth is often on volitional rather than intellectual grounds—we just don’t want to be held accountable to any moral standards or religious doctrine.

This accusation may be the purview of the hard-right flavors of Christianity. I’ve seen plenty of Progressive Christians push back against it, with a good essay on it here. But it had nothing to do with my deconversion. If anything, I was outraged by how little accountability existed in my religion. If I’d wanted to have zero accountability, I’d have stayed Christian and gone into ministry!

Deconversion Accusation #6: Bad Christians/Bad Churches

Christians love to imagine that Bad Christian boogeymen chase otherwise-faithful believers out of churches. One progressive pastor, Nadia Bolz-Weber, hypothesizes that churches full of Bad Christians lead to disillusionment and deconversion. As she puts it:

People don’t leave Christianity because they stop believing in the teachings of Jesus. People leave Christianity because they believe in the teachings of Jesus so much, they can’t stomach being part of an institution that claims to be about that and clearly isn’t.

Okay, people deconstruct or disaffiliate from evangelicalism for that reason, sure. Evangelical churches are and have likely always been cesspits of dysfunction, drama, abuse, and power grabs. But I don’t think that’s why people deconvert. It’s certainly not why I deconverted. I left a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) church because of the sheer hypocrisy and money-grubbing I witnessed there, but I didn’t leave Christianity itself. Rather, I joined a Pentecostal church.

The truth is far more nuanced: Hypocrites and abusers within Christianity don’t cause deconversions by themselves. These run-ins often lead to disaffiliation, yes. But for those who leave Christianity entirely, often the real issue is what those Bad Christians’ hypocrisy and abuse represent within the context of Christianity:

  • A religion that doesn’t change people
  • Churches that have no way to ensure the safety of members, nor even any desire to do so
  • Christian leaders’ misplaced priorities: Caring far more about recruitment than about protecting the flocks
  • Christians’ tendency to use Bad Christians as an accusation before forgetting they exist and need to be dealt with
  • A god who seems quite content to let Bad Christians wreck churches and Christians’ own credibility (and I bet Ananias and Sapphira wish he’d been so chill and lenient in Acts 5!)

If Christian claims were true, then Bad Christians would be as rare as hens’ teeth. But they’re not rare at all. They’re everywhere! Heck, on social media they might outnumber their loving, rules-following brethren.

So to this accusation, I can safely say that no, Bad Christians didn’t make me deconvert.

Deconversion Accusation #7: Jesus didn’t give me a pony

This accusation takes many forms:

  • A traumatic event or situation happened that Jesus didn’t help with
  • Prayers weren’t answered
  • Magic healing requests weren’t granted
  • The magic Jesus ATM didn’t burp out whatever was desired

No matter the form, this accusation gives Christian judges a good opportunity to sneer down at the ex-Christian who mentions that prayer doesn’t work or that magic healing and miracles aren’t real.

The atheist professor in the first God’s Not Dead (2014) might perfectly illustrate this accusation. His mother died of cancer when he was a child, despite him praying fervently for her magic healing. So he is very angry at Jesus for not healing her. The movie falls over itself to put him on blast over his reason for being an atheist.

Jesus is not a tame lion, Christians mindlessly parrot from their beloved Narnia books. How dare humans think they can command him! But if a real live god promises in writing to do something, then I expect him to do it. This one doesn’t. So either he can’t or he doesn’t want to. And that, in turn, means he either isn’t as powerful as Christians imagine, or he’s a very different character than Christians think. Another explanation, of course, is that the Christian god simply doesn’t exist. Either which way, he’s not worth my time.

It comes to this: The only reason why anyone thinks Jesus does anything for anyone is because Christians insist that he does—at least, as long as the person asking fulfills a variety of ever-changing asterisked terms and conditions. It’s not ex-Christians’ fault for taking standard teachings about Jesus seriously.

But again, deconversions occur less because of this situation and far more because of what it means within Christianity. Every Christian knows that Jesus doesn’t answer their prayers. And many of them remain Christian for life. At the same time, I know of no ex-Christians who left over a specific prayer not being answered. I sure didn’t leave over that.

Deconversion Accusation #8: I didn’t hear XYZ Apologist’s routine

I love this one so much. It isn’t as popular nowadays as it used to be, but there was a time when I could count on accusers pushing some apologist’s work at me. It was always an apologist they thought had totally answered whatever dealbreaker problem I’d mentioned earlier—though very often, they hadn’t actually read or engaged with the apologist’s work. They had simply heard from other Christians that it satisfied this or that specific concern.

This accusation ran along these lines:

Accuser: Why did you lose faith?
Me: I found out Christian claims weren’t true.
A: [shocked Pikachu face] WhawhaWHA? Which ones could you possibly mean???
Me: Name one. I don’t believe the Crucifixion story, the Resurrection story, the—
A: Oh! You should read The Case for Christ! It shows how those things totally really happened!
[Narrator: No, it really doesn’t. People have been debunking that book for decades now.]

Whenever a popular apologist came out with some new surreal, otherworldly routine, we could count on its arguments showing up in discussions with Christians. They radiated outward through Christendom like ripples in a pond after a stone’s thrown into it. First, the keyboard warriors picked up those arguments and parroted them in forums and comment boxes. Then, the arguments filtered down to pastors, who’d parrot them at their flocks. Finally, the normies heard them and adopted them. Eventually, the routine would simply be part of the ambient background of the Christ-o-sphere.

There’s also quite a bit of incest involving apologists’ work. Especially within evangelicalism, content creators of all kinds freely borrow from each other and build upon each other’s work. And like pastors borrowing sermons, they don’t always cite sources.

Case in point: While researching the source of the phrase “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist,” I thought it might be a Ray Comfort slapstick routine. It’s not. It’s the title of a book by the slightly more respectable apologists Norm Geisler and Frank Turek. Ray Comfort picked the phrase up for one of his evangelism tracts. He probably had a hand in popularizing the routine, too. But the book seems to have come first.

Apologetics exists as a Christian literary genre because Christianity lacks objective supporting evidence for its claims. If Christians had evidence, they wouldn’t need apologetics at all. They’d just pony up the facts. Apologetics isn’t the facts; it’s what Christians use instead of facts. It’s just using arguments instead of evidence. The best it’s ever going to do is make Christianity sound slightly less implausible, and even that much only happens with people who don’t (or can’t) use critical thinking skills on religious claims.

I’ve heard of people deconverting after realizing that apologetics is a mask for Christians’ lack of evidence. Usually, apologetics speeds deconversion along rather than stopping it. Either way, none of it would have mattered to me.

Deconversion Accusation #9: I was never a TRUE CHRISTIAN™ at all

This accusation takes two forms. The far more common one involves accusing me of having been a fake Christian all along. But if I reconvert to their particular flavor, then I’ll be a TRUE CHRISTIAN™ at last and will never again find fault with my beliefs. They get this idea from 1 John 2:19:

They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.

Of note, the author of that chapter describes antichrists here, not ex-Christians in particular. This accusation also often draws from imagery in the Parable of the Sower in Matthew 13, which casts ex-Christians as seed sown on rocky ground or among thorns. Those seeds may grow, but they don’t develop into mature food for Yahweh.

(Related: Do these guys actually know why shepherds tend sheep?)

Calvinists employ a form of this accusation. Their doctrine of perseverance of the saints points them there. As they believe it, if I remain deconverted then I was never one of the preselected “elect” in the first place. The elect are those few humans allowed into Heaven. Needless to say, non-Calvinists demolish this accusation easily enough. But it has popped up sometimes.

All I can say here is that Shane Pruitt of the SBC can only wish and dream that the young adults he evangelizes were half the TRUE CHRISTIAN™ I was. In fact, after my deconversion I spent a long time thinking that I was the only person on Earth who’d wholeheartedly believed and embraced what my tribe called the full gospel, only to deconvert later.

If I was not an honest-to-goodness TRUE CHRISTIAN™, then nobody ever was, and nobody ever could be. The only difference between my accusers and me while I was Christian is that I deconverted—and they haven’t…

yet.

And now, what actually happened

The one and only factor that caused my deconversion is that Christian claims aren’t true. They do not line up with reality. That’s it. That’s the only reason that mattered enough to me—that even could have mattered so much—to leave Christianity over it.

All that said, I certainly understand why Christians can’t fling the one accusation that would be true. They’re taught that their message is perfect, their god is real, and their claims are true. That’s a lot of faucets pouring water into their faith pools! So that reason doesn’t even occur to them.

If they come anywhere near it, they exhort ex-Christians to stop “listening to men” instead of “listening to Jesus.” Oh, they do love that exhortation! They aren’t ready to learn what ex-Christians know:

Everything in Christianity, just like everything in every religion since recorded history began, has always come from humans.

Since my deconversion, I’ve learned to place my former beliefs in the greater context of religions in general. I don’t hold Christianity’s lack of veracity against it any more than I hold Hinduism’s false claims against Hinduism itself. It might be just part of the human situation—or more accurately, of various hijacked quirks of our brains’ evolution—to want to believe in gods and supernatural stuff.

But I only want to live in truth for whatever remains of my life. That is why I deconverted. It’s also why nothing’s tempted me to return to Christianity in all the decades since that heartbreaking experience. It’s a lot easier to live in truth without saddling myself with a worldview based on wishful thinking, threats, and lies.

Let us go forth and live in truth.

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PS: Here’s a really good blog post (archive) I found while researching this weekend. It brought tears to my eyes. I knew right away that I wanted to share it with you.


Captain Cassidy

Captain Cassidy is a Gen-X ex-Christian and writer. She writes about how people engage with science, religion, art, and each other. She lives in Idaho with her husband, Mr. Captain, and their squawky orange tabby cat, Princess Bother Pretty Toes. And at any given time, she is running out of bookcase space.

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