Breaking Up is Hard to Do--The Trauma of Losing One's Religion

Recently, I have been contacted by two different men who are currently in the ministry but who no longer believe. Both men feel trapped. In both cases, the men's wives do not know the full extent of their unbelief. No one in their churches knows about it. While it seems obvious that they should just resign their churches and move on with their lives, its not that simple. Both men have bills and expenses and no good way to earn a living apart from the ministry. In addition, the stigma that is sometimes attached to an apostate and the grief from family members is tough to deal with.

Even if one is not a Pastor, it is still hard to walk away from the faith. It creates psychological and emotional trauma much like that of going through a divorce. Marlene Winell, Ph.D., a licensed psychologist and former evangelical Christian herself, has written a book entitled: Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion (1993). She also has a practice in which she counsels those who have decided to leave their conservative religion behind. I highly recommend her work.

In the book, Leaving the Fold, she writes:

In general, leaving a cherished faith is much like the end of a marriage. The symptoms of separation are quite similar--grief, anger, guilt, depression, lowered self-esteem, and social isolation. But whereas help for divorced people is readily available, little if any assistance is available to help you to leave your religion. The familiar sources of church support are no longer there, and family members still in the fold may actually shun you (p. 15).

Losing one's religion can create enormous confusion. Winell explains:

This can be a major upheaval because your religion essentially defined your entire structure of reality and your old definitions no longer hold. Notions of who you were, your purpose in life, your relationship to others; needed explanations about the world; interpretations of the past; expectations for the future; and directions about how to feel, think, make decisions, and lead your life have been lost. Letting go of such a massive structure can leave you feeling totally adrift (p. 17).

So, its not easy to break away from something that has been so central to one's life. Something that essentially defined you. Something that provided a neat package of explanations for everything in life. Its like starting life over. Many people just can't tackle such a task.

However, for those that do, once they get resettled, they ususally feel liberated. Winell states:

The experience can also be liberating, like breaking out of prison. If you feel oppressed by all the formulas and judgments, the rules and regulations, you might now feel a great relief, able to think and feel and experience much more of yourself. Some people describe a wonderful, almost euphoric, feeling of "coming home" when settle in to the notion of just being alive and living life now, in this world (p. 17).

For those who might be struggling with a loss of faith and feeling overwhelmed by it all, I highly recommend Winnell's book.

Here is a podcast of an interview of Marlene Winnell in which she gives her de-conversion story. She details her own religious upbringing on the mission field and how as an adult she gradually lost her faith.

The video clip below is an interview of Marlene Winell conducted by Valerie Tarico, who is also a psychologist, former evangelical and author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth.


Dr. Winnell talks about how destructive fundamentalist religions can be on children and about her recovery seminars.

Will Atheism Eventually Replace Religion?

Belief in a personal god seems to be on the decline.

According to the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) over 12 percent of Americans identify themselves as atheist or agnostic and another 12 percent as deistic. That means close to one quarter of the US population (the most religious country in the first world) does not believe in a God that can be known or that has spoken to man.

The situation in Western Europe is even more dramatic.

Belief in God declines in more developed countries and is concentrated in Europe in countries such as Sweden (64% nonbelievers), Denmark (48%), France (44%) and Germany (42%).

The above quote is from a a provocative article in Psychology Today, "Why Atheism Will Replace Religion", by Nigel Barber. He gives four reasons why atheism is growing faster than religion in today's world.

1. Religion is no longer necessary to cope with economic and health-related uncertainties.

It seems that people turn to religion as a salve for the difficulties and uncertainties of their lives. In social democracies, there is less fear and uncertainty about the future because social welfare programs provide a safety net and better health care means that fewer people can expect to die young. People who are less vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature feel more in control of their lives and less in need of religion.

2. Religion is no longer necessary to cope with physical, emotional and psychological problems.

In modern societies, when people experience psychological difficulties they turn to their doctor, psychologist, or psychiatrist. They want a scientific fix and prefer the real psychotropic medicines dished out by physicians to the metaphorical opiates offered by religion.

3. Religion is less popular with the more educated.

This hunch is supported by data showing that the more educated countries have higher levels of non belief and there are strong correlations between atheism and intelligence.

4. Religion is no longer necessary to fulfill the social and entertainment needs of people.

Moreover, sport psychologists find that sports spectatorship provides much the same kind of social, and spiritual, benefits as people obtain from church membership. In a previous post, I made the case that sports is replacing religion. Precisely the same argument can be made for other forms of entertainment with which spectators become deeply involved. Indeed, religion is striking back by trying to compete in popular media, such as televangelism and Christian rock and by hosting live secular entertainment in church.

Jonathan Merritt, in an article in The Huffington Post, disagrees with Barber. He writes:

Barber ignores the unrivaled work done by people of faith throughout history. No other social organization can report the miracles, life-change, healing, and hope produced by faith communities. There is a new generation rising up to meet the brokenness of the world with innovative and, one might say, supernatural solutions. No sports team or therapy group can claim that.

I think the demise of religion has been exaggerated by Barber. It is true that more and more people feel the freedom to publicly announce their unbelief but atheism still carries a stigma in the USA. It is doubtful that a person could be elected as President of the United States who admitted he or she was an atheist. On the other hand, though, the UK may soon have an atheist as prime minister. David Miliband has an excellent chance to one day be the Prime Minister. So things are changing, but Europe is decades ahead of the US.

In addition, as I pointed out in a previous post entitled, Is Religion Cognitive-Emotional Cheesecake, religion still has a lot of appeal. I think religion will continue to evolve, as it always has, and accommodate itself to a more scientifically-oriented culture, but it will not disappear any time soon.

Would the world be better off without religion? I tend to think it would. Just imagine if we could wave a magic wand and make Islam disappear. Many (but not all) of the world's conflicts would no longer exist. While Christianity is not as big a threat to world peace, it does in my opinion, siphon off resources that could be much better used. Hopefully, man will one day realize that to focus attention and resources on this world rather than on a future world is in all of our best interests.

The Psychological Appeal of the Penal Substitutionary Theory of the Atonement

In yesterday's post, I mentioned my agreement with James McGrath that the Penal Substitutionary Theory (PST) of the atonement has psychological appeal. I believe that is one of the reasons for the popularity of Christianity through the ages and especially the popularity of evangelical Christianity today.

Another author who discusses the psychology of atonement is Stephen Finlan. He is the author of Problems with Atonement (2005).

He writes:

[I]f we are going to question certain staples of Western atonement theology, we need to ask why atonement has been so compelling in religious thought . . . . The pervasiveness of atonement thinking only makes sense if it incorporates fundamental instincts about reality that are shared by most people (pp. 79-80).

Atonement theologies confirm two fundamental and universal instincts about life and about divinity: the belief that nothing is free, that there must be give-and-take in the spiritual economy as there is in the material; and secondly, the intuition that ritual establishes order. . . . There seems to be a universal belief or conclusion that the Divinity gives nothing for free; that "man always pays . . . [and] Death has a right to his victims", so deliverance from death must be matched by a payment or "compensation." There is a "compulsory feeling that somehow compensation should be given" (H.S. Versnel, "Self-Sacrifice, Compensation, and the Anonymous Gods," in Le Sacrifice dans l'Antiquite [1980], 178-79 cited in Finlan, p. 80).

Finlan sees two key components in the psychology of atonement: (1) the idea that forgiveness should cost something, and (2) the idea that "ritual establishes order." Regarding (1), it is clear that most people feel "bad" about themselves when they fail to live up to their particular standard of morality. This "feeling" is usually called "guilt." More precisely , it is "subjective guilt" as opposed to "objective guilt." "Objective guilt" involves other people finding one guilty; whereas, "subjective guilt" involves one finding one's self guilty. There may be cases where one is considered to be guilty by others and one does not consider one's self guilty. There may also be cases of the reverse: one considers one's self guitly while others do not. For our purposes in this post, I am dealing with "subjective guilt."

How does one remove one's bad feelings (i.e., subjective guilt) about an action or lack of action? Richard Swinburne's four components of atonement, I think, illustrate the process: 1) Repentance , 2) Apology, 3) Reparation, 4) Penance. Not all such are needed in every case. For some wrongs reparation is inappropriate--there is no reparation for an insult; for the less serious wrongs penance is not needed; but sincere apology must be accompanied by repentance of the kind described (Responsibility and Atonement [1989], p. 84). So, according to Swinburne, to remove guilt a person needs to (1) repent. This involves an internal recognition that what one did was wrong. (2) Apology involves an external recognition, to the parties harmed, that what one did was wrong and one is sorry for the action and the harm caused by the action. (3) Reparation involves "making amends." Here one attempts to restore the conditions that existed prior to the wrong act. (4) Penance involves punishing oneself or doing something meritorious to help offset the wrong action.

If the victim of the wrongdoing accepts these acts from the wrongdoer as adequate "payment" for the crime, then the victim forgives the wrongdoer. Then, the wrongdoer can usually forgive himself and subjective guilt is removed.

Why does the PST have special appeal? Because man realizes that he is not in a position to adequately "pay" God back for his wrongdoing. He can repent and apologize (confess) but what can he do to "make amends"? I think that the history of religion shows that men feel a need to make a sacrifice to their god(s). They offer up something valuable to God as evidence of their repentance and they usually make vows about not doing the action again. Even so, they often feel that their sacrifice is inadequate and they often fail to live up to their promise not to do the action again. Thus, they continue to offer more and more sacrifices. The beauty of the PST is that one full and completely satisfactory sacrifice has already been made and in addition, the merit of Jesus' perfect life is also imputed to the sinner, so that even though he cannot personally live a sinless life, his substitute has already done that for him. This allows him to move beyond his own inadequacy and trust in the actions of another, one who is supremely qualified to make atonement.

The idea of a substitute suffering the penalty in man's place is also more psychologically satisfying than if God simply pardoned man without anyone suffering the penalty. When a person is pardoned, the penalty is removed but the person's guilt remains. Pardon is defined as: the excusing of an offense without exacting a penalty. While some Christians argue against the PST by saying that it is more noble of God to forgive without exacting punishment, the fact is, such forgiveness would not remove the sinner's subjective guilt. It would remove his "objective guilt" but not his "subjective guilt."

Another important element, in addition to sacrifice, that Finlan believes plays an important role in the elimination of guilt is ritual.  He says: There is a nearly universal belief that properly constructed ritual has a conserving and restorative function (p. 81). In Christian circles, baptism is normally the ritual that signfies forgiveness. Whether one takes baptism as literally removing sin or symbolically removing sin, the formal ritual allows for external, visible confirmation that forgiveness has been accomplished. If at some future time, one doubts whether one has been forgiven, one can look back at the ritual for assurance. In evangelical circles, where baptism is usually seen as symbolic, a person may look back at another ritual such as "walking an aisle," or "saying a prayer" for confirmation that he has been forgiven. Our sense that the ritual deals with our guilt and inadequacy is instinctive (Francis Young, Sacrifice and the Death of Christ [1975], p. 109 cited in Finlan, p. 82).

The evangelical doctrine has advantages over other religious belief systems that teach that one must actually "do" something in order to be forgiven. In these other systems, People learn to develop strategies of barganing, appeasement, diversion, and payment through self-punishment and pain--each of which is manipulative. These strategies were played out in great detail in the Middle Ages in penances, self-flagellations, promises of building chapels, and other attempts at negotiation with God (Finlan, p. 82). But in evangelical teaching, Jesus has already "done" everything that needs to be done in order for God to forgive, all the sinner must do is to "accept" it. This retains the idea that forgiveness ought to "cost something," but it removes the requirement from man to pay what he cannot pay. In other systems, man never seems to have assurance that his sin is forgiven and thus, he is never finally released from subjective guilt. The genius of the PST, and I think one of the reasons for its widespread appeal, is that it does allow one, who accepts its teaching, to experience immediate and full release from the sense of guilt. The joy and elation that this removal of subjective guilt brings is indeed very appealing.