The Fading Christian

Christian kids, or others for that matter, leave the Christian faith gradually. They drift. As Eliot once put it, they go out not with a bang, but a whimper. I've spent a few years thinking about this process, and I now think I can generalize about the steps in the process of drift.

The Center...

My own kids show me what the center looks like. They love Christian school, Christian songs and Christian stories and Christmas with a passion unrivaled. They demand that we pray before bed and keep dad accountable to kind speech with their sisters. They write notes telling me how much they love God and Jesus and how they love Church. Their world is filled with the magic of belief. Christianity is their atmosphere, and their joy seems so full as they breathe it in.

They even talk about how bad it is that people say bad words or do unkind things. They confront their friends about these things with childlike exuberance. Even when something goes wrong and they do something that must be punished, they recognize the severity of it. It pains them to let daddy down, and more importantly, to let God down. They take sin seriously and feel it deeply when they do it.

One can only see their Christian experience as pure, even naive, authenticity and totality.

Step One... Commitment to Sin...

This is not meant to be a judgment, but a mere recognition of fact. We are all committed to our sinfulness. Since our sinful desires stay with us through life, we always struggle with them. The Christian is given assistance in resisting, but it is always a battle. And frankly, at times it seems that no assistance is being given at all.

A thought begins to germinate, ever so gradually, below the surface. "Perhaps it is really quite natural to desire these things. Perhaps it is unnatural to resist them..."

Step Two... Aesthetic exhaustion...

Put simply, the maturing church kid now is simply bored with Christian music and Christian preaching and Christian art of all kinds. He can't even say why. If you were to press him about why Christian art is bad, he couldn't tell you anything of substance. It is just a mood. His mood has shifted from Christian music, for example, to his own ephemeral preoccupations. Of course, this means that Christians don't get to speak into his heart or mind. He has removed his attention and tuned it to various decidedly non and even anti-Christian voices.

Step Three... Moral exhaustion...

He now moves from thinking that perhaps his sinful desires are natural, to being exhausted with the Christian message of moral resistance to them. He has made the attempt, however feebly, to resist his own sinful tendencies, and has not succeeded. His new influences have shown him a kind of audacious freedom in doing things he once knew were wrong. He is now able to laugh at these behaviors, often with his new friends.

Then he steps into his church to hear the pastor condemn his actions, and now he no longer feels conviction; instead, he feels exhaustion. He is simply tired of hearing this message. There is only one solution.

Step Four... Leave the Church...

He stops going to church. The art is boring and so is the message. He is put off by the constant moral badgering.

He is probably a freshman in college now, and free to sleep in on Sundays. No one on his dorm hall is interested in going to church, so it becomes the most natural thing in the world to have his "day of rest." He is taking a sabbath from sabbath.

Step Five... Circle of influence changed...

By systematic steps, he is no longer in any appreciable orbit around Christian things or people. He doesn't read Christian literature. He doesn't listen to sermons. He doesn't pray. He doesn't hang out with Christians. Church is irrelevant to him, though he would still claim at this point to be a Christian. He boldly asserts that "one need not go to Church to be a Christian." Other pious rebels affirm him in this, and they shuffle back to the kegger.

Where once his atmosphere was Christian art, themes, stories and people; he is now in a decidedly different atmosphere. His friends are, simply put, much cooler than Christians. They are authentic, bold, interesting and broad-minded people. They judge no one, except the judgmental. Jesus is literally totally undetectable in his new circle of influence, unless you count his hipster friend Jesus from Spain.

Step Six... Values assimilation...

He now thinks like everyone else on the campus. He affirms gay marriage, but can't say exactly why. He likes socialism, legalization of drugs and pacifism, but can't argue them with any rigor. He loves all the art, culture and general priorities of his contemporaries. He lives like them, talks like them, parties like them. He is a clone. All his uniqueness has been summarily beaten into conformity. Where once he embraced the foolishness of the cross as his wisdom, now he simply acknowledges the foolishness of the cross.

Step Seven... Ridicule those "Christians"...

He is now the "new" kind of Christian, which is to say that he is totally secularized. He has now almost completely forgotten the Bible. Occasionally he quotes it, but only to mangle its teaching. He is a vague "theist," still clinging to his childhood emotional connections to the Christian faith. But when he becomes honest, he will realize that he is no longer a Christian, and perhaps never really was. What he has always done is to adjust to the climate. When that culture was Christian, he was a Christian. When it became secular, he became secular. He is a product of his environment, and nothing more. The curious thing is that all the while he claims a vigorous autonomy. He is his own man. He is not owned by anyone.

But when his friends come around and mock the Christian faith in various ways, he joins right in. We Christians are, according to his new friends, backward, unscientific and hypocritical. We caused the bloodshed of the world. We fought against scientific development. We live in the ideological fog of "white privilege." If we could have our way, we would take peoples rights from them and slavery would return. We believe in a dusty old book that encourages polygamy, genocide, xenophobia, homophobia, classism, fantasy and simple-mindedness. He has made a complete journey away from Christianity. He has become worse while thinking that he is getting better.

(Note: While a person is in the process of drift, there needs to be an intellectual justification for it. In my experience, most reach for the "search for truth," or "search for self," or "disillusionment" paradigm. And they use this paradigm because it gives them the assurance that they are in control of the drift. But I want to suggest here that most people have their thinking on this inverted. They think that their search or disillusionment is the cause of the drift. I think it is quite the opposite. My convictions on this come from my theology and my own experience. Convoluted intellectual rationalizations often come after moral compromise. Romans 1 would agree with me here!)