Category Archives: Mentoring

Mentoring

Why do Christians leave the faith? Dashed expectations of a “nice” God

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Part 2 of a brilliant series by Bradley Wright. This time he explains how people leave Christianity because they expect God to meet their needs and he doesn’t.

Excerpt:

In a study of religious deconversion, we analyzed 50 on-line testimonies posted by former Christians, and in these testimonies we found four general explanations for deconversion. The first explanation, which I wrote about last week, regarded intellectual and theological concerns about the Christian faith. The second, which I elaborate here, regards a failed relationship with God. Almost half (22 of 50) of the writers expressed sentiments that in some way God had failed them by His not doing what they thought He should.

God’s perceived failure took various forms, most of which fall under the general heading of “unanswered prayers.”

One way that people felt that God had failed them happened when He did not respond to requests for help during difficult times. A young man raised in a Baptist church epitomized this feeling of failure when he wrote about God not answering his prayers about family difficulties. He wrote: “The first time I questioned the faith was when my grandmother shriveled up in front of me for 6 month’s due to cancer. I was 13 & my mother & father [were] getting a divorce. My father told me I should have been aborted. I prayed to God but nothing fails like prayers.”

So you can see here where people have this expectation that it is God’s job to give them good health. But is that anywhere in the Bible? Is it God’s job to make us healthy so that we can have a happy life, even if we are busy spending that happy life ignoring him and not knowing his character. When you ask a serious Christian what it is like to be a Christian, we will tell you that what God is about is NOT making us healthy or happy, but instead giving us time and peace to study him, to make plans to serve him, to execute those plans, and to have (sometimes unhappy) experiences that cause our sympathies to change as we feel what God feels. In short, life is about getting closer to him, and suffering and sickness is one of the tools God uses in order to get us to know him as he is and to participate in the relationship.

Likewise, a woman raised in a Methodist household described her step-father as “cruel and abusive” to her, and she could not understand why “if God loves me, why won’t he protect me instead of letting this happen to me?”

I think the reason why God allows suffering like this is to create people who take his rules about sexual morality seriously. When I was growing up I had front-row seats to the divorces of many of my friends. I remember vividly talking to children who cried to me about how they felt when their mothers invited new men into the house after the divorce. Pain and suffering like this is a reminder to us that the moral law is real, that God expects us to follow it in order to prevent harm. One of the reasons why I am chaste is because I listen to the stories of men whose girlfriends aborted their babies, the stories of women who cohabitated and then were betrayed, the stories of the children of divorces. And from this I learn that morality is real and it matters.

In a variation of this theme, some deconverts lamented God’s inactivity amidst spiritual difficulties. A man in his forties, a former elder at a charismatic church, wrote: “In my own life, no matter how much I submitted to ‘God’ and prayed in faith, ‘sin’ never seemed to leave me. Well, what’s the point of being ‘saved’ if you aren’t delivered from ‘sin’?”

This is why accurate theology matters. No serious Christian thinks that you stop sinning after you become a Christian, and no serious Christian thinks that prayer alone is a solution to sin. To stop sinning, you need to engage more than the spirit, you need to engage the mind. Most people want to spiritualize things because prayer is easier than study. But if you want to stop sinning, the best way is a combination of prayer and study. If you want to stop premarital sex, study how premarital sex affects STD infection, risk of divorce, future marital stability, oxytocin, quality of marriage, and so on. Study the risks of divorce. That’s how you stop sinning. Some people want to dumb Christianity down to the level of superstition then they complain that it doesn’t work. But Christianity is better when you learn more and work harder.

A former Southern Baptist described the various good things that God failed to give him: “God promises me a lot in the bible and he’s not come through. Ask and it shall be given. Follow me and I will bless you. I promise you life and promise abundance. Man should not be alone. I have a plan for you. Give tithe and I will reward you. All broken promises. This god lacks clarification. This god lacks faith in me. He wants my faith. I want his too.”

Do you know what I expect from God after reading the Bible? I expect what Jesus got: pain and suffering during obedience. What kind of simpleton reads the Bible and thinks that it is about getting goodies from God? That is NOWHERE in the Bible. It’s projecting Santa Claus onto God and that isn’t going to work – God has other plans for us, and those plans involve work and pain. People become Christians because they want to be like Jesus, and they understand that Jesus was not having fun. He was doing a job, and he wasn’t happy or appreciated.

Other writers took a different approach to God’s failures. They too sought God’s help, but when they did not receive it, they simply concluded that God did not exist. A former member of an Assemblies of God church explicitly linked unanswered prayers and the existence of God: “How many humble and totally selfless prayers offered up to and ignored by the imaginary skydaddy does it take for the average person to finally throw in the towel and say [God doesn’t exist]!!!!” His answer: “Too damn many.”

It’s so strange to me that people think that the best way to see God interfere is to pray. The way I see God working in my life is when I go home and listen to some debate about the problem of evil, and then the next day some atheist asks me out to lunch to talk about why God allows evil. Maybe instead of doing easy things, we should actually invest in our relationship with God and then see if he responds by giving us work to do. Maybe a relationship with God is about serving him, and the joy is about seeing him reward those efforts by working with us and through us. Maybe God has more for us than just entertainment.

Still others sought a tangible sign of God’s presence. A former Pentecostal exclaimed: “There were many nights while in bed I would ask God to show me the truth, or give me some type of sign to show that he or she existed. These prayers would never be answered. So I would just go on with my life having doubts.” Likewise, a former Baptist missionary wrote: “I’ve begged God to show himself to me and put an end to my inner torture. So far it hasn’t happened and the only thing I know for sure is that I have unanswered questions.”

I think this paragraph is interesting, since I consider attending church, praying and singing hymns to be useless when compared with practical and difficult things like chastity, apologetics, charity, studying hard things, getting a good job, committing to caring for others who have special needs, etc. If you want to feel the presence of God, then do the right thing and take the punishment for doing it. That’s what Christianity is really about. When William Dembski was drummed out of Baylor University for opposing the presupposition of naturalism in the sciences, he experienced God more than all snake-handling, tongue speaking Pentecostals in the history of the universe. Similarly for Michele Bachmann’s decision to take in 23 foster children into her home. Christianity is a serious religion, and it is not accessible to superstitious people who reduce it to singing and praying alone. Christianity is about serious people doing serious things. Even reading the Bible is not enough – you need to study the Bible.

The example of Dan Barker

I’ve actually written about this before in the context of Dan Barker, a charismatic fundamentalist praise hymn singer and writer who expected God to validate all of his irresponsible ministry decisions. Eventually, he fell away from the church because he had this ludicrous Santa Claus caricature of God that didn’t match reality. Dan Barker is the complete opposite of everything I consider a manly Christian to be. He is the polar opposite of what I recommend to men when I recommend that they study math, science, engineering and technology, avoid music, singing and dancing, and prefer apologetics and conservative politics over speaking in tongues and apocalyptic fiction. This man, when he was a “Christian”, was the complete opposite of the WK Christian man model. However, he is more welcome in most churches than I am, because most Christians reject my views.

I think that Christians should protect themselves from that by being aware of how emotional experiences and praise hymns warp your view of God. God is a person, and he has a goal for you – to know him. To achieve that goal, it may not be effective to just give you everything you want. It may be the case that God has to allow you to experience some suffering, to increase your character and to bring your goals in line with his character. Children have to grow up, and shielding them from pain and responsibility doesn’t allow them to grow up.

In my own case, I have my own disappointment with God, revolving around my chastity while waiting for marriage. But does that cause me to reject God? Hell, no. I just assume that he has something else he wants me to do instead of being married, and I am OK with that. It’s part of this relationship that God’s goals are important to me. I have to participate and hold up my end of the relationship. When it comes to God’s purposes in the world, my happiness and comfort are expendable. That is an appropriate response, I think, to Jesus’ own self-sacrificial behavior on the cross. I was born obligated to him, and I am OK with that. It does not bother me.

By the way, I wrote about Part 1 in the series, which was about how the #1 cause of apostasy is lack of apologetics.

UPDATE: Commenter Mbelina adds this much-needed and valid correction:

You make some very good points.

However, I think you’re a bit too dismissive of people’s very real pain. Imagine being told by your parent that you should have been aborted. That would mess anyone up. It’s not just expecting to get what you want (I have no sympathy for that). It’s people struggling intellectually and emotionally with the problem of evil in a very real way.

Moreover, I think you need to realize that a lot of people who believe these rubbish things and have expectations based on a warped reading of scripture got that from a church where they respected the pastor as someone who “knows”. There’s a lot of bad theology coming from many pulpits and when things don’t go well it doesn’t stand up to the test of reality. I think churches need to be held accountable for verse-byte culture, trite “answers”, and platitudes. People need REAL Christianity, not the prosperity gospel or “seeker sensitive” hogwash.

And she is 100% correct of course.

What I came to realize is that whenever a person was mistreating me like this, that they also were mistreating God. He wasn’t the cause of this evil, and he has to let people be free to be evil. It was this that allowed me to make the move from being a victim to being sympathetic with God and then finally being a servant of God. God is at least as upset with evil that happens to me as I am. In fact, that is the message of the cross. Sin was so hated by God the Father that he literally had to send his own Son to atone for it on the cross. One you understand that, then you don’t think of human evil as something that happens to “me” but as something that happens to “we”. And then you feel a lot less like a victim.

Mentoring

Are churches preparing women to choose real men for husbands?

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First, I want every one to take a look at this verse on providing for a family  in context: (1 Tim 5:3-8)

 3 Give proper recognition to those widows who are really in need.

4 But if a widow has children or grandchildren, these should learn first of all to put their religion into practice by caring for their own family and so repaying their parents and grandparents, for this is pleasing to God.

5 The widow who is really in need and left all alone puts her hope in God and continues night and day to pray and to ask God for help.

6 But the widow who lives for pleasure is dead even while she lives.

7 Give the people these instructions, so that no one may be open to blame.

8 Anyone who does not provide for their relatives, and especially for their own household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.

And these verses on charity in evangelism: (Phil 4:10-19)

10 I rejoiced greatly in the Lord that at last you renewed your concern for me. Indeed, you were concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it. 

11 I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.

12 I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.

13 I can do all this through him who gives me strength.

 14 Yet it was good of you to share in my troubles. 

15 Moreover, as you Philippians know, in the early days of your acquaintance with the gospel, when I set out from Macedonia, not one church shared with me in the matter of giving and receiving, except you only; 

16 for even when I was in Thessalonica, you sent me aid more than once when I was in need. 

17 Not that I desire your gifts; what I desire is that more be credited to your account. 

18 I have received full payment and have more than enough. I am amply supplied, now that I have received from Epaphroditus the gifts you sent. They are a fragrant offering, an acceptable sacrifice, pleasing to God. 

19 And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus.

Now I want to talk about a very disturbing trend that I see in the church. I see a lot of women who are not prepared to choose men who are going to fill this provider role. Men have a role, straight from the Bible, to provide for their wife and children, and to donate to support evangelistic efforts. And providing is not predicated on how a man makes a woman feel. Providing is based on the things such as:

  • working for money before you are legally able to work for money
  • working summer jobs during high school and college
  • working during college or doing college degrees while working full-time
  • doing consulting work or running your own business from home in the evenings
  • studying science, technology, engineering and math (no exceptions!)
  • not drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes – no addictions of any kind
  • not spending money on hair, tattoos, clothes, shoes or flashy junk
  • own your own car, and keep it well-maintained
  • own your own pet, and keep it healthy and well-trained
  • pay your rent or mortgage payments on time
  • carry no debt, borrow no money
  • avoid depending on government welfare or student loans
  • not taking sick days, not getting sick at all
  • purchasing resources for others, especially things like apologetics books, to build them up
  • giving charity to solid Christian speakers and funding apologetics events (William Lane Craig debates)
  • making investments in stocks or real estate
  • maxing out 401K contributions and Roth IRAs
  • taking women out on dates, driving them in the man’s own car, and paying for everything
  • spending money to help the pro-life and pro-marriage causes (Morse, Klusendorf)

And I think you have to give bonus marks for getting up early, although I can’t do that. I know someone who does, though – the hardest working software engineer I know.

Women should not prefer young men who are studying political science, psychology, English, education, grievance studies, and other non-quantitative subjects which do not equip a man to provide enough salary and savings to run a Christian life plan (homeschooling or private Christian schools or both). What ends up happening is that there is a lot of fighting over money, especially with women who don’t have savings of their own before marrying. Without money, the children will likely get pushed into public school and they influenced by secularism and leftism.

What to do? Pick a man with a proven record of taking his responsibilities to study and earn seriously.

Here are some of the top earning careers:

Best Undergrad College Degrees By Salary – Full List
STARTING MEDIAN PAY MID-CAREER MEDIAN PAY
Petroleum Engineering $97,900 $155,000
Chemical Engineering $64,500 $109,000
Electrical Engineering (EE) $61,300 $103,000
Materials Science & Engineering $60,400 $103,000
Aerospace Engineering $60,700 $102,000
Computer Engineering (CE) $61,800 $101,000
Physics $49,800 $101,000
Applied Mathematics $52,600 $98,600
Computer Science (CS) $56,600 $97,900
Nuclear Engineering $65,100 $97,800
Biomedical Engineering (BME) $53,800 $97,800
Economics $47,300 $94,700
Mechanical Engineering (ME) $58,400 $94,500
Statistics $49,000 $93,800
Industrial Engineering (IE) $57,400 $93,100
Civil Engineering (CE) $53,100 $90,200
Mathematics $47,000 $89,900
Environmental Engineering $51,700 $88,600
Management Information Systems (MIS) $51,000 $88,200
Software Engineering $54,900 $87,800

I think that marrying someone who is not in one of these careers makes no sense at all, especially in light of a global recession.

And just to be clear, this is an area I struggle in myself. I am great at working for money, and saving it and investing it. But I say a lot of controversial things and a lawsuit would not be good for my fortune. I should be spending more time on evenings and weekends keeping my skills up, and that’s what I’m going to be doing on my vacation. But I think the standard stands regardless of my own abilities to meet it. It is the standard.

Money is an important part of the Christian life. The Bible says that if a man does not work, neither shall he eat. We have a tradition on what men are supposed to do in Christianity. Men are supposed to take care of business, and women are supposed to prefer men with proven records of taking care of business. Being handsome and fun is nowhere in the Bible as a qualification for men to be good husbands and fathers. But earning money and providing for others in the community is a non-negotiable requirement. It’s as required as the obligation to not marry a non-Christian man.

Women who are serious about Christianity will prefer men who meet the specifications laid out in the Bible. And this has to have been demonstrated over the course of years – a pattern of studying hard things, working multiple jobs, spending little, saving much and supporting family and evangelism.  To me, a woman who prefers a man who has no record of providing is a woman who has been influenced by feminism. She rejects the traditional roles of men and insists on a man who is has no authority to lead because he does not have the provider role. That’s what’s really going on here. Men who earn have authority to lead and hold a woman accountable when she misbehaves, and some women hate being led and being held accountable. (By being held accountable I mean disagreeing with the woman, canceling optional goodies, etc.)

I think we have a major problem in this society, and in the church, where we think that women are above criticism. We think that anything they feel like doing is a good idea. We think that their complete lack of rational thought and lack of planning in relationships is somehow “romantic”. We think that women who embrace spontaneity and ignorance of statistical data are “free spirits”. Is it any wonder that the out-of-wedlock birth rate is 42%, the divorce rate for first time marriages is 45%, and women are shacking up with unqualified men instead of getting married?

This is all – all – caused by the fact that women have no idea what men are for, and they deliberately prefer non-judgmental, non-theologically-exclusive, non-rational, tolerant, intuitive, wusses instead of men who give them hard books to read and who hold them accountable when they misbehave. Women today think it is a bad thing when a man holds her accountable when she disrespects him in public, but think it is a good thing to date a man who asks his parents to borrow the car keys before taking her out. Huh? I had a current year car with only 7500 miles on it at age 17 – because I was working two jobs in high school, and part-time IT/desktop publishing in my own business on the side.

Women who are interested in testing a man’s abilities can use my checklist for finding authentic Christian women. Those questions work on men too.

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Mentoring

Why do Christians leave the faith? The surprising importance of apologetics

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From Black, White and Gray.

Excerpt:

Several colleagues and I recently finished a study of why Christians leave the faith, and we were surprised at what made a difference as well what didn’t seem to matter. In the next few weeks, I’ll be reviewing our findings in a series of posts.

To start with, let me tell you how we conducted our study. We were interested in how people who left the faith—let’s call them deconverts—explained their actions; i.e., why did they think they left the faith. In order to do this, we found a website on-line in which former Christians post their “testimonials” about their religious history. We chose 50 of these testimonials and read, reread, and reread again each one and then we discussed them as a group. Our goal was to find themes in these deconversion narratives, and several themes did emerge.

[…]All told, we found four general explanations offered by these 50 people as to why they left Christianity.

The first explanation regards intellectual and theological concerns about the faith. A full two-thirds of the testimony writers emphasized these concerns and some wrote about little else.

Some of the intellectual concerns were issues that would be faced by members of any religion, not just Christianity. For example, what is the relationship between religion and science? Does believing in one negate the other? What is the role of logic versus faith?

One man, who was a fundamentalist Christian in young adulthood, defined faith and reason as mutually contradictory, and he described his departure from Christianity as a victory of reason. He wrote: “for most of us, the battle was entirely within ourselves. It was a pitched battle between our faith and our reason, and eventually our reason just refused to be suppressed any longer, no matter what the potential consequences.”

Many other writers, though, focused on theological issues specific to Christianity. One of the issues that arose with the existence of hell and how that could be reconciled with the Christian image of a loving God. Basically, how could a loving God throw his children into hell for eternity?

A man raised as a Baptist expressed what he viewed as a contradiction between love and hell: “Would a loving father really not allow some people to have a chance and send them to hell for eternity? I don’t think so!”

One woman, who loved her grandparents, now deceased, wondered how God could condemn them for not having believed in Him. She exclaimed: “what the hell kind of jerk was God if he’d condemn people like my grandparents?”

A related theological issue regarded human suffering here on Earth. If God is powerful and loving, why is there suffering? One writer likened God’s allowance of suffering to a negligent police officer. ““What if a police officer sat and watched silently as a child was murdered even though he had the power to stop it?”

Other writers attributed to God a more active role in human suffering, often pointing to His actions in the Old Testament. A former Methodist wrote of his doubts about God starting early in his life when he learned about Noah’s Ark. “The turning argument for me was actually a story that is in children’s Sunday school books – Noah’s Ark. I started to really think about the fact that God pretty much killed the ENTIRE planet.” Similarly, a former Pentecostal described God’s actions in the Old Testament as “atrocity after atrocity.”

The final frequently-expressed concern regarded the Bible and its reliability. Is it accurate? Is it believable? A former Catholic dismissed the Bible altogether. She wrote: “Science has all but proven that the Old Testament could not have happened. It is also fast proving that the New Testament is nothing but fiction.”

My friend ECM had a different take on it, commenting on Facebook:

I’m going to go out on a limb and state that most people simply don’t care.

You can refute arguments/do apologetics all day long to the run-of-the-mill village atheist, but that’s not going to do you much good in reaching the average non-believer since they’re generally apathetic about the whole project–God, etc., simply has no impact on their daily lives.

What I think would help is if *actual* Christians walked the walk a bit–I think this is, really, the crux of your problem. Too many of you say you believe in God and are Christians, but how many actually abide by the general strictures of the faith?

This has a rather disconcerting effect on non-believers and it makes people like me, who are at least open to the idea*, more wary because how can I very well take you seriously if you’re not actually practicing it? It smacks of “do as I say, not as I do.” (It also gives the media et al a hammer w/ which to beat Christians over the head with ad nauseaum, causing massive damage to credibility.)

(It doesn’t give me an pleasure in saying any of this, but there it is from someone that’s at least open to the concept.)

(And please! Please let’s not turn this into a thread on apologetics aimed at ‘showing me the light’–I know all the arguments and have gone over them a thousand times w/ the Knight via email, chat, etc., so I’m well-versed on all it.)

*I would classify myself as a small ‘d’ deist.

I should clarify: when I say “average non-believer” I am also referring to, in far too many (most?) cases, those that actually profess a belief in God and identify as Christian.

And my friend Dina wrote this:

Apologetics should be more than winning debates with athiests. Today, defending the faith ought to be more concerned with ridding the church of the crowd pleasing rot that has infiltrated it over the last century. The problem is exactly what Eriku and lots of us see in professing Christians. Sadly, many many people who profess to be Christians are no different from the world, so the world views us all as either hypocrites or liars. Times may change, society may change but God and the bible does not. The bible is the only rule to direct us and while philosophy has much to offer, if it backs up the bible do we need it in the first place? If it goes against the bible, then its worthless man made opinions. The problems with Christianity started in the church, and the solution will have to start in the church as well. He did it before and He will do it again.

I replied and said that stronger, more consistent Christians are important, but I think apologetics is needed in order to build them up – because, as I’ve written before – people only act Christianly when they have reasons to believe that Christianity is objectively true.

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