(RNS) — Americans are leaving organized religion in staggering numbers. In the newly released book “Done: How to Flourish After Leaving Religion,” Hope College psychology professor Daryl Van Tongeren offers ways to navigate the “grief, loss, pain, and longing” that often accompany such transitions and then points to new paths to find meaning.
His book goes beyond anecdotes and memoir to offer insights based on his research — focusing on the social motivation for meaning and its connection to virtue and morality — as director of the Frost Center for Social Science Research at Hope College.
For readers who want more, Van Tongeren is working on another book with his wife, Sara Showalter Van Tongeren, a clinical social worker who specializes in working with people undergoing religious changes. Their forthcoming book is meant to help counselors and therapists, who may lack a religious background themselves, to understand how important religion is to many people and why leaving it is often so disruptive to their lives.
RNS talked to Daryl Van Tongeren about why people are leaving religion and what they’re turning to next to find fulfillment. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What inspired you to write “Done”?
For a long time, I’ve done research on how religion provides people with a sense of meaning in life. I noticed a trend of people leaving religion, and the rise of the “nones.” Everybody had been treating the non-religious as this monolithic group, like there’s the religious and there’s the non-religious. It seemed quite strange that they never considered someone’s religious history. If someone had been religious at one point, they wouldn’t be like the other religious “nones.” The other question was: With the number of non-religious people and people leaving religion rising, what are the psychological consequences of leaving religion?
In “Done,” you talk about four chief reasons people walk away from faith. You call them the “four horsemen of religion’s apocalypse.” What are they?
The four horsemen are, we’re learning from the data, the four primary reasons why people are leaving religion. The first is cultural stagnation. People are becoming increasingly more progressive. Their beliefs and views are changing, but religious institutions are remaining stagnant. People say, “I left for intellectual reasons, or I simply outgrew my faith. Or there can be more pointed differences in values, like, “My church is not LGBTQ+ affirming or doesn’t support women in ministry or engages in systemic racism.”
The second is religious trauma, as when somebody experiences religious abuse or trauma at the hands of religious institutions or religious leaders, whether it’s firsthand, they witness it happening to someone they know or it takes place at an institutional level.
Thirdly, people experience what they see as a simplistic view of suffering. People encounter personal adversity or suffering, and they say that they can’t make sense of that adversity or suffering in light of what they’ve been taught about God or their theological beliefs.
The fourth is a problematic label, so people either no longer want to be identified as “religious,” or in the United States, in certain areas, as “evangelical,” as those terms have come to be associated with some values or connotations that people may not want to associate themselves with. This was especially true after 2016 when 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, and a poll a couple years ago found, and I think I might have mentioned this, that 30% of self-identified evangelicals do not believe in the deity of Jesus Christ, which should be the unifying theme of what it means to be evangelical. So that term has taken on some type of sociopolitical value that is very much divorced from its original religious connotation.
Are you finding that people are leaving other American faith communities in the same numbers?
Sociological trends suggest that all faiths are decreasing, but Christianity is losing the highest number (of people). It could be in part because that was the dominant religion in the U.S., so there are more people to leave. But it also could be something about the way that evangelical Christianity has really been showcased. A number of values and beliefs and practices espoused by evangelical Christianity are really being questioned in a number of different ways. They include some conservative views on science, sexuality, gender and marriage. People are saying those values are no longer consonant with my beliefs. I need to find something that I can believe and holds integrity.
Is there a process to leaving religion? If so, what does it look like?
The process starts with what a lot of people call deconstruction, people doubting what they believe and struggling with what they think. It’s like everything is up for criticism and interrogation. During this period of deconstruction, people break down all or many of their beliefs. Then there’s a process in which they revise their beliefs.
Some people still land within religion. Those people reconstruct. They’re still firmly within the religious tradition or a religious tradition. They may still identify as a person of faith, but their faith looks very different.
Others revise squarely outside of religion. They deidentify. So, people may no longer believe in God, major theological tenets or any supernatural agents at all. They may change their emotional connection with the divine and no longer feel connected to or relationally close to the supernatural (the divine or God). They might stop listening to the moral mandates of religion, finding a path that’s more aligned with how they feel like they should live in the world. They may also disaffiliate from their religious communities.
In the book you talk about the concept of “religious residue” and the strong, sometimes unconscious pull religion can have, even on people who believe they have left it behind. Can you say more about that?
The way that people think, feel and behave continues to resemble the way that they thought, felt and behaved when they were religious, even after they no longer identify as religious. We see this in lots of different areas including in their attitudes toward God or their attitudes toward other religious individuals and religion in general. We see this in, you know, the frequency with which they engage in religious practices. Is this good? Is this bad? I think of it as descriptive.
We know that religion is associated with being pro-social. We found that after leaving religion, people still donate more money and are more willing to volunteer than people who have never been religious. We also did some recent research that found that people’s more negative beliefs that were provided in religion can continue to persist as well. For example, people continue to believe in hell and the devil significantly more after leaving religion compared to people who’ve never been religious — even when they consider themselves an atheist.
Leaving religion takes time. I hope to normalize it. I look for people to become aware of this residue, so they can look for it in areas of their life, and then be making decisions that are aligned with their values, instead of just responding out of the religious residue. I want people to be able to make value-aligned decisions that allow them to craft an authentic identity. If they are aware that religious residue is at play, they may have to be extra cautious and ask themselves, am I doing this because of something I really want, or is this a lingering remnant of my religious past?
So how do people learn to flourish after leaving religion?
We have some evidence that life loses a bit of meaning after leaving religion. Religious folks report the highest amount of meaning, and religious “dones” are equal to religious “nones.” There’s a real felt cost to leaving.
Usually, people invest in new sources of meaning. Relationships have always been the biggest sources of meaning, so it’s likely people pour into those, but that can be rocky, if their family or friends are not supportive. They may also seek nonreligious spiritual connection, such as through nature or appreciating the cosmos (awe, wonder, curiosity). But perhaps one of the more challenging parts of this transition is assembling a new worldview that makes sense, is coherent, and is aligned with their experiences in life. That can take time to assemble. Sometimes folks flock to politics as a new ideology; for others, it might be “religion-adjacent” experiences that have the look and feel of religion without the religious content.
It’s a slow process, but with time and intention, people may experience existential growth and flourishing.