Not long ago, Ryan Burge revealed some of the major disaffiliation drivers in Christianity these days, with the top contender being hypocrisy. In other words, 42% of Christians who disaffiliated from Christianity cited hypocrisy as one of their major reasons for leaving the religion. In response to his tweet, loads of evangelicals got big mad about the people leaving Christianity because of Christian hypocrisy. Today, let’s review their responses, see what they definitely aren’t doing, and then see what’s more likely to be behind this strangely-aggressive defensive of hypocrisy as endemic to Christianity.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 3/27/2026. It’s available now! Note: I’m finishing recovery, hopefully, so I’m looking forward to restarting voicecasts next week. Thank you for your patience. I’m doing a lot better.)
SITUATION REPORT: Like a get-rich-quick scheme, but everybody’s broke—and really angry whenever anyone notices they’re broke
I really expected this story to go further than it did, but it bubbled up briefly and then sank into the social media tar pit almost immediately. On February 1st, Ryan Burge tweeted an interesting graph about a survey he’d help run:
It’s about the drivers of disaffiliation. In religious terms, disaffiliation happens when someone religious leaves their religious group. It doesn’t mean they’re deconverting, or discarding belief itself, just that they’re not participating in the group anymore. (There’s a whole world out there of churchless believers, after all.) In today’s case, the 2400 people in the survey are all “Nones,” meaning they do not affiliate with any religion now. They’re “None of the Above,” like me.
This survey’s results aren’t shocking, of course. Ryan Burge has been talking about disaffiliation and hypocrisy for a long time. In 2021, he identified excessive politicization and hypocrisy as two big drivers of disaffiliation. So really, this was the latest bit of news dropping about that topic.
The replies he got to the tweet felt like Ye Olden Dayes of the Great Evangelical-Atheist Keyboard Wars from the 2010s. Man alive, evangelicals really let their inner hypocrites frolic in that thread! And we’re going to talk about that frolicking today, because almost every response was a defensive reaction to one driver above all: hypocrisy.
Defining hypocrisy and its scope in high-control religious groups
Hypocrisy is saying one follows one moral/ethical standard while actually doing the opposite. For example, Christians claiming to deeply want to do what Jesus told them to do, yet not doing a bit of it. Or saying they follow a set of rules that they absolutely do not follow at all.
Almost everyone falls down on their own standards sometimes. Yes, even me. But a hypocrite is someone who holds out that they are a moral authority for holding standards that even they largely ignore.
High-control religious groups are full of hypocrites—for reasons we’ll touch on next time. These authoritarian groups feature huge demands made of followers in terms of beliefs and practices. For now, I’ll just say that hypocrisy is an intrinsic part of these groups. It cannot be eliminated. The particular people attracted to these groups make hypocrisy not only inevitable but dramatic in nature.
Any evangelicals over the age of about 20 are well aware of the number of hypocrites in their groups and, at least to some extent, the degree of that hypocrisy. I certainly was! The leaders of these groups teach followers, however, not to care about others’ hypocrisy. “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” they learn, though that Bible verse isn’t about disregarding hypocrisy at all. (Oh, the things we learn after deconversion, right?)
So when I see the biggest driver of disaffiliation being hypocrisy, yeah, that gets my attention. Just getting to that hurdle requires a lot of emotional heavy lifting.
First trend in answers: Hypocrisy? No, they just weren’t TRUE CHRISTIANS™
The first trend I noticed was the usual one: No True Scotsman. This is a logical fallacy that runs like this:
- That guy looks and talks like a Scotsman, but he salts his porridge
- No true Scotsman ever salts his porridge
- Therefore, that guy isn’t a true Scotsman.
In this case, people who leave Christianity due to hypocrisy were influenced by fakey-fake fake Christians. The real-deal TRUE CHRISTIANS™ aren’t hypocrites by definition. Here are some quotes:
Yeah, an awful lot of people treat religion as a mere social club, otherwise some of the most common reasons for leaving would make absolutely no sense. [Local archive]
Religion is different from Christianity [Local archive 2]
You gotta love the devil. He teaches a whole generation that Christianity is hypocritical. Meanwhile, Christianity teaches that we are a fallen world, everyone is a sinner, and we all need a Savior. In other words, the devil convinces people to leave the faith for the exact… [Local archive 3; tweet doesn’t seem to exist anymore]
And that’s the reason why MAGA is the worst thing that ever happened to modern Christianity. Seeing these counterfeit Christians embrace a man who shamelessly violates virtually every principle that Jesus ever taught turns countless people away from the true religion of Christ.
[2nd tweet] In the ancient world Christianity was spread by how Christians acted, seems the inverse is true as well. [Local archive 4 combining two tweets; also, 2nd tweet is flat wrong.]
The implication is always clear: TRUE CHRISTIANS™ live out their faith. They do what they say they’re supposed to be doing. But in high-control religious groups, it’s painfully easy for bad-faith actors to trick the group into thinking they’re doing exactly that when they aren’t at all. So we can’t imagine that the people claiming that are actually living that way.
Rather, we generally find out the reverse: Any Christian making a big screaming deal of their religious affiliation is likely going to be a hypocrite. The louder the big screaming deal, the worse of a hypocrite they’ll turn out to be. That’s the entire reason the Republican party stopped calling itself “the party of family values,” for goodness’ sake: Their “family values” politicians kept getting caught in sex scandals.
And again, people in high-control groups get taught to ignore all of that and focus only on making it to Heaven.
The excuse parade: But but but we’re all sinners! Therefore hypocrisy is fine!
In Christianity, the high-control groups in particular like to claim that they have a moral high ground over all other humans. In fact, a god inhabits them in a very real sense, and in this possession he influences them to be better human beings than normies can be. Atheists might muddle their way through morality in some ways, but they simply lack the foundation for morality: strong faith.
… That is, that’s how they act until hypocrisy as a dealbreaker comes up. Then suddenly all Christians are sinners, what can you expect, all we did was claim to speak for a god so why are you all suddenly holding us to such high standards, etc. Their outrage is hilarious. And I saw plenty of that in the responses:
I find two of these reasons odd, since Christianity’s doctrine of sin/the Fall means one should expect human hypocrisy and bigotry (including religious forms). Most biblical figures were hypocrites at times. It’s also an easily empirically supported doctrine. [Local archive 5]
Translation: “Religious people are sinners” [Local archive 6]
Here’s an entire wall of tweets from one local archive image:
[Tweet 1] They’re missing the whole point. Christians aren’t better than non-Christians. They just realize they’re sinners who need Jesus.
[Tweet 3] Leaving Christianity because of religious hypocrisy will never make sense. Christianity’s central thesis is that its adherents are inherently sinful; hypocrisy should only reinforce its validity.
[Tweet 4] I’m often reminded of what my pastor, Lon Solomon, said: “The character of Jesus Christ does not rise and fall on the character of Christians.” My hypocrisy is not an excuse to reject God.
[Tweet 5] “Something isn’t true because one of the people who claimed it didn’t live by it.” Is a wild way to determine fact.
[—All from this image, local archive 7.]
I’d sooner join a gym full of wall-to-wall out-of-shape people or a business investment group full of people who are flat broke after years of involvement. Yes, their behavior matters. It tells me their ideology works as promised and does what they claim it does. If those conditions aren’t true, then how can I trust any of their other assertions about it? “A hospital for sinners,” which is what Christians like to call themselves during such arguments, only makes sense if those sinners are actually getting better. But they never do.
And suddenly I’m reminded of a funny scene in an old “Bullshit!” episode about multi-level marketing schemes (MLMs). In the scene, a young MLM victim tries to recruit a fast food worker. The worker says he’s not open to the idea until the erstwhile recruiter has made real money at it. The young MLM recruiter tries to FOMO the worker, but the tactic fails. In that moment, you can actually taste the recruiter’s despair. Alas, I can’t find the clip online anymore, but here’s another snip of the episode.
Point remains:
If Christians couldn’t recruit until they actually lived like they believed their own claims, we’d drown in their despair.
Gaslighting: The reason for the season (of decline)
When wafting palms heavenward about them all being sinners fails, there’s always gaslighting. This one was subtle. Here, Christians sneer at the idea that hypocrisy was really a disaffiliation driver at all. No, see, the real issue was sin. The ex-affiliated just didn’t want to say the truth they know deep down. But these cold-reading experts know!
Is that the reason or the post-hoc rationalization they gave for why they left? [Local archive 8]
That’s like asking high school dropouts why they left school. “The school’s fault” is the predictable answer [Local archive 9]
[Tweet contains an image of Fred from Scooby Doo unmasking a “ghost” labeled “Religious hypocrisy!” The ghost is really a person labeled “They said my sin was bad.”] [Local archive 10]
They’re all excuses. These folks simply don’t want to stop their sin and be accountable to Jesus. [Tweet 2 from local archive 7, and if I actually wanted a life with zero accountability then I’d still be evangelical/Pentecostal.]
These aren’t the reasons they left
They are the reasons they SAY they left [Local archive 11]
I noticed at least a few of these accounts looked like Calvinist/Reformed evangelicals, which definitely tracks. Incidentally, Accountability Lad up there even treated us to a clobber verse about how no TRUE CHRISTIAN™ ever claims to be without sin. It led to some funny exchanges with atheists. (For those who can’t or don’t wanna click Twitter links, archive 12, archive 13.)
Yes, they really only attacked hypocrisy in that survey results
If you noticed that every single reply seems to center on hypocrisy, then you’ve got a good eye. In fact, I didn’t see any responses from Christians that responded to anything else. Of the 12 driver reasons for disaffiliation, about half could be considered part of hypocrisy. The non-hypocrisy drivers included “Religion doesn’t make sense,” “Science” (meaning just in general, I guess, as a counterpoint to Creationism), “Moved away and just never went back,” and “Reading the Bible.”
A few heathens brought up reading the Bible as a driver for deconversion. I also saw one Christian say she actually really liked science. But otherwise, almost no replies from Christians focused on anything but hypocrisy.
I can’t blame them. Again, they are indoctrinated very carefully to dogpile any hint of hypocrisy as a reason for leaving. They’ve never had good counters to it or any of the other drivers, but they definitely think they have great zingers for hypocrisy.
But what were these guys hoping to accomplish with attacks on hypocrisy?
Remember, Ryan Burge is an evangelical. More than that, he’s a pastor (well, his church closed, but in my mind he’s still a pastor—just he’s between churches). The people replying are almost all evangelicals themselves, from what I could see, with some Catholics peeking through here and there. And as they trample the validity of disaffiliating due to hypocrisy, are they really expecting heathens to get struck dumb by all that disapproval and re-affiliate?
I suspect they realize that ship has sailed. Instead, I think they’re signaling to the group that the indoctrination still works—and sending a message to the tribe about what’ll happen if the flocks dare to cite hypocrisy as a reason for their growing doubts.
And yet it moves, is all one can say about the situation. Whether they like it or not, whether their indoctrination allows them to accept it or not, their hypocrisy is, indeed, a reason why so many people are ending their affiliation with Christianity. No matter what they say or how hard they stomp their widdle feetsies about it, their behavior is going to continue to matter.
Defending the one thing they can’t actually change
And that really is the killer shark in the waters of the Christ-o-sphere, isn’t it? That’s why they defend their own hypocrisy so ferociously.
They can’t change their hypocrisy. That would require massive overhauls in their system, ones which neither they nor their leaders want to make. It would require a sea change in how they view themselves in relation to their god and to the other people on the planet, which are all also changes they definitely don’t want to make either. We’ll talk more about this tomorrow, but almost the entire reason they’re involved in the high-control end of Christianity in the first place is its permission slips for hypocrisy.
So if the equation is:
HYPOCRISY —> DESIRE TO DISAFFILIATE
And if one element must change to end disaffiliation over hypocrisy, then it will need to be the way hypocrisy leads to a desire to disaffiliate. High-control Christians can’t end hypocrisy itself. So they must end its tight connection to disaffiliation instead.
Thus, in a weird way they end up defending hypocrisy itself as an intrinsic part of their culture. It’s absolutely bizarre to see them go there, but once seen it cannot be unseen. They want to be hypocrites to their hearts’ content, but also for their hypocrisy not to impact their membership numbers or money intake, and also for them to think of themselves as far better people than normies could ever be.
High-control Christians could just openly admit that they know quite well that their god doesn’t exist, but their behavior sends that message anyway.
NEXT UP: The gap between authentic being and inauthentic seeming. See you soon! <3
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