Thirty or forty years ago, investigating the phenomenon of religious deconversion would have been a challenging task. Surely people were leaving the church at that time, but finding those people and getting quality data from them would have been difficult. In the 1960’s, for instance, Lofland and Stark had to camp out in a cult compound and observe new recruits in order to study religious conversion. Imagine camping out on a college campus waiting for students to leave the faith... Read more
The book “Faith After Doubt” was authored by Brian McLaren, and released in the year 2021. There were a few reasons I opted to read this book in reference to my deconversion studies, one of those being that McLaren seems to be offering this book as an alternative to “deconstruction,” a popular term for exiting Christianity. As the book title suggests, McLaren is offering an alternative form of “faith” that includes doubt. The Emergent Church Movement Brian McLaren is... Read more
Introduction It is no surprise to science that there exists a tension or distrust between psychology and Christianity in the West (it is important to make this Western distinction, as research suggests that the distrust Westerners display toward psychology is less prominent in Eastern iterations of Christian practice) (Clobert et al, 2015). This is a fact that has been well researched and documented over time (e.g., Kloos et al., 1995; Newberry & Tyler, 1997). In 2010, E. L. Johnson wrote... Read more
The Brain Damage You have no doubt heard it said that we still have much to learn about the human brain. The fact is that we know a great deal – enough, in fact, to know what we don’t know. The brain is a difficult organ to study, largely because it is not the sort of thing one can open up and watch as it is working. A variety of brain imaging techniques have expanded on our knowledge of the... Read more
In 2019, researchers Perez and Vallieres conducted an in-depth study on the subject of deconversion. The two researchers identified three different areas in which doubts and objections blossomed, which ultimately led to deconversion. The first of these areas was the mind. The potential deconvert began to find what they considered very reasonable objections to the facts about Christianity. What about all of the errors or contradictions in the Bible? What about the scientific evidence against Christian beliefs? What about philosophical... Read more
WHAT IS RELIGIOUS TRAUMA SYNDROME? There is a phenomenon known as “Religious Trauma Syndrome” (RTS) which I sometimes hear about when I listen to deconverts talking about their experiences with one another. Those who speak out about their RTS describe it as a chronic mental illness said to be a combination of religious abuse and the trauma of leaving one’s religious environment. All of my knowledge of RTS has come from listening to discussions about it held by individuals who... Read more
Testing Thought Complexity It’s a fairly common trope: religious people are knuckle-dragging uneducated troglodytes more obsessed with conspiracy theories than with actual education, and elevating dogma over science. In 2018, researchers Shannon, Lucian, Kimberly, Alex, and Joeann decided to put this trope to the test. But how does one test the complexity of a person’s thinking, much less an entire category of people? In the case of Shannon et al, they ran what they called an “Integrative Complexity Analysis” on the... Read more
Cameron Bertuzzi is an influential speaker and media producer in the popular field of Christian discourse known as “Apologetics.” Unlike most kinds of religious media, Apologetics is frequently aimed at a non-Christian audience, or at Christians interested in responding to criticism of their beliefs. Cameron has made his mark on the scene of Christian Apologetics by way of his show “Capturing Christianity” in which he interviews influential speakers and writers in the field. While Cameron has not, himself, developed upon... Read more
Peter Boghossian is a philosopher and college professor who is responsible for inventing the practice of “Street Epistemology.” Street Epistemology is the atheist version of Street Evangelism, meaning that it is a cold approach in a public forum, wherein an atheist approaches a religious person and employs tactics to talk the person out of his or her religious belief. As a deconversion researcher, it is of interest to me as to how effective Street Epistemology is, and what Boghossian had... Read more
In his March 24th talk at the 2012 Reason Rally, popular atheist speaker Richard Dawkins called upon fellow atheists to adopt this tactic toward the religious: “…mock them. Ridicule them. In public… Religion makes specific claims about the universe which need to be substantiated, and need to be challenged, and, if necessary, need to be ridiculed with contempt.” In his 2013 book A Manual for Creating Atheists, author Peter Boghossian takes a view almost opposite that of Dawkins. Says Boghossian,... Read more
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