Myths About Church Dropouts

Sam Rainer at Church Forward has a good post on church dropouts where he summarizes the research that is going into a book he will be publishing.  Like the book UnChristian, he's focusing on younger folks, although his focus is a bit narrower than theirs - he's specifically targeting 18-22 year olds whereas UnChristian had a broader base of research.  Still, the results seem similar.  He has found that 70% of those who leave the church do so between the ages of 18-22, but the reasons may not be what we think.

UnChristian pointed out that, of those disenchanted with the church, many of them had relationships with professing Christians, thus there disenchantment can't be explained away by hostile media.  Sam finds similar things.  Here's the bullet points - these are the three main myths:

1. The influence of the secular university has pushed them away. Not true - of the dropouts, it is a virtual statistical tie between those who go to college and those who don't. 
2. High school students are planning to leave the church once they go to college.  The overwhelming majority of high school students do not plan to leave their church when they graduate.
3. The scandal-happy media has disenchanted our youth.  Only 15% of those who leave church say it is because of moral or ethical failures in church leadership.

I'll be very interested to see what he does point to as the cause of these dropouts.  For me, points 1 and 3 are the main ones worth considering because they illustrate that the cause of dropping out may have less to do with overwhelming worldly temptations than we think, and more to do with a lack of a compelling faith to begin with.  This is not to deny that the world does offer overwhelming temptations, but it seems to me that the temptations are overwhelming to those who have an underwhelming faith.

As C. S. Lewis illustrates and as Kelly Monroe Kullberg and the folks from the Veritas Forum demonstrate, there is nothing necessarily overwhelming about the influence of a "secular" university and God can indeed be found in places like Harvard. I'm working on a theory that I hope to blog about later, but the gist of it is that one of the reasons that Christian kids succumb to the "overwhelming" tempations and arguments of the secular world is that they spend their lives in churches that condition them to believe that the secular world will overwhelm their faith, so when they make contact with said secular world, they are conditioned to believe that their faith can't hold up.  I know those are provocative words that need more development, but to point you to where I am thinking check out this article by Theodore Dalrymple on his dealings with recovering heroin addicts.  He has found that a heroin addict's expectations and anxieties about the withdrawal process are what makes the withdrawal process seem so overwhelming.  I'll try to connect the dots on that later, but I think there is an analogy here for Christian kids - if we condition them to believe that secular arguments are overwhelming and powerful they will import power to the secular world.

But back to the main point - if Rainer is right here the world out there poses less of a problem to the faith of our kids than do their own hearts and maybe the church's lack of presenting a compelling faith.  I know it is fashionable to blame the dropout rate on the church, and I do that sometimes and very often the church is blameworthy, but let's remember that we are always working against indwelling sin.  Thus the church needs to assess it's own culpability in failing to present a compelling faith, but we also need to remember to place the responsibility where it belongs - on the individual who makes the choice to drop out. 

I am also intrigued by that comment that 80% of Christian kids don't plan to leave the faith after graduation.  So what does that mean? Is the droput rate less than we think?  I don't think so or Sam and the UnChristian folks wouldn't be writing these books.  The question then becomes of what happens to kids with the best of intentions once they do graduate.

So, it's stimulating to think about.  Sam invites interaction on his post so I'd encourage you to do so there, but also feel free to share your thoughts here.

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Comments

[Molly]

I posted on my blog my visceral reaction to your theory about why kids succumb to "overwhelming" temptations (caveat: I haven't read unChristian, nor do I know much about it, so I don't know what he or Sam Rainer say).

Here's what I wrote:

I've never thought about that before, so I'll have to think about it more. But the immediate thought that came to my mind is a different reason. Maybe (just maybe) Christian kids are brought up to believe that the secular world will feel evil when they encounter it. Then they go to college and realize that drinking is fun, that lightning doesn't strike when you sleep in on Sunday, that you don't feel much different on a day that you do read your Bible than on a day that you don't ... and it's a whole lot easier to not. There are really nice people who don't go to church; in fact, I fit in really well (better?) with them. Christianity with all its self-denial is hard and doesn't feel rewarding (this doesn't even need to be a conscious thought) ... "slipping" and having fun isn't nearly as bad as it's always been made out to be.

The gist is: we expect doing the unChristian thing to feel evil, and so much of the time, it doesn't. It feels natural. Satan, after all, masquerades as an angel of light. CS Lewis figured that out in The Screwtape Letters.

I dunno ... just a thought. Probably prompted by my current Sunday School class, going all the way back to the second lesson, that we have 2 counsels in the world, and we (counterintuitively) must choose to reject Satan's counsel that God is withholding from us what is truly good. We (now I'm preaching to myself) need to be convinced of what is truly satisfying. This upside-down Kingdom...

[Rick]

A ministry helping with that transition period for students is:
http://www.youthtransitionnetwork.org/

[garver]

Do you know of any studies or books that look at the phenomenon of deconversion post-college on the part of college converts?

What I have in mind is that, in my experience, there is a significant percentage of young people who come to some kind of profession of faith in college through the witness of a roommate, friend, campus ministry, etc., who then get involved in campus ministry, but post-college, fall away from the faith.

My suspicion is that there are several inter-related factors that contribute to this:

First, church-life post-college often doesn't really resemble at all the kind of close-knit peer-to-peer community one often finds within a college fellowship.

Second, some professions of faith are a phase within identity formation on the part of young people who are troubled and need acceptance within a social group - though they are often unable to admit the full scope of their troubles to the group.

Third, that there are temptations some people face that they can "manage" while part of a group to which they feel accountable, but that this unravels later on.

These factors conspire to make sustaining faith difficult in the post-college milieu, once the initial context and support structure for professing faith is lost.

But that's just speculation based on personal experience. I'd be interested in some actual data.