Finding Faith, Losing Faith: Stories of Conversion and Apostasy
Title:
McKnight, Scot, and Hauna Ondrey. 2008. Finding Faith, Losing Faith: Stories of Conversion and Apostasy. Baylor University Press.
Rating:
1/10
Review:
I was asked to review this book by one of the academic organizations to which I belong. I’m not sure they understood what the book was when they sent it out for review. Had they known, it is unlikely it ever would have been sent out for review for this particular organization.
The basic premise of Finding Faith, Losing Faith is that the authors have realized there are patterns to conversion stories Yet, it’s not like they have noticed this on their own. Instead, they simply steal Lewis R. Rambo’s understanding of conversion (Rambo is a professor of psychology and religion at the Graduate Theological Union) and apply it to four groups: individuals who leave Christianity and become religious independents (i.e., no affiliation), Jews who become Messianic Jews (i.e., they believe Jesus is their savior but they remain Jewish in identity and practice), Roman Catholics who convert to evangelical Christianity, and evangelical Christians who convert to Roman Catholicism. They then analyze a bunch of stories of people who have followed these paths for patterns, finding reasons why people leave one group for another.
The book doesn’t actually add anything theoretically, making it pretty useless for sociologists. Instead, it takes what is already known about conversion and applies it to these cases. As a result, you get four repetitions of: (1) people start in a specific context, (2) they have a crisis of faith, (3) they seek out a resolution, (4) they find something or someone to resolve their crisis, (5) they adopt a new identity, and (6) become somewhat critical of their previous identity in the process. This understanding of conversion was outlined by numerous scholars in the 1980s (e.g., Wright and Ebaugh both come to mind), but it is not all that different from the outlines of conversion from much earlier (e.g., William James).
So, what do the authors have to contribute? Substantively, nothing. The reason why is because their methodology is flawed. To analyze these conversion paths, the authors search around on the internet for peoples’ stories and combine those with published biographies of people who have experienced these identity changes. They then analyze this non-random sample for patterns. There is no clear sampling frame for choosing specific stories and no attempt to gather a representative sample of conversion stories. In fact, the methodology is only loosely described, but is basically, “We found a bunch of stories here and there and are going to analyze them as though we have a representative sample.” You might be saying that I’m not really being fair to the authors. After all, did they really say that they had a representative sample? No. They did not. But they generalize from their sample to the respective populations as though they do, which is a lethal flaw. For instance, the authors claim that the “most common” reason people “abandon” Christianity is because of “scientific evidence” (p. 27). In order to claim that this is the “most common” reason, you would need a representative sample of novel independents, which the authors don’t have. They cannot actually claim any frequencies in the respective populations based on what they find in their sample. If they had limited their frequency claims to their sample, that would have been fine, but they do not. Here’s another example from the conversions of Roman Catholics to evangelical Christianity, “Once at college, campus-based ministries abound… and are frequently the context in which RCEs first encounter evangelicalism and through it the Bible. The high occurrence of college RCE conversions causes Shea to refer to college Campuses as the “trenches of the proselytizing wars” between Evangelicals and Catholics” (pp. 148-149). This pattern of generalizing beyond what their data can tell them is repeated often. For instance, they claim: the majority of Jews who become Messianic Jews do so because of psychological and pathological problems (p. 89), that most Messianic Jews have some mystical experience that facilitates conversion (p. 92), and most evangelical Christians convert to Roman Catholicism because of a “special relationship” with someone and not because of the theology (p. 200). In short, while the authors have some interesting data, they don’t have the data they need to make the claims they do.
The reason I was asked to review the book was because it deals with people leaving religions, which is my area of expertise. I was initially hopeful that the authors were on to something when they said, “Theoretically speaking, all conversions are apostasies and all apostasies are therefore conversions” (p. 7). This was the one potential contribution of the book, to recognize that people who leave religion are experiencing a conversion just as much as those who are joining a religion. Claiming these are distinct reflects a bias in the sociological literature, favoring those who join religions over those who leave. But my hope was short-lived, as they immediately revert back to calling religious exiters “apostates,” singling them out as a distinct class of conversion, and suggesting that they convert for different reasons than other people. This is just one of many places (see below) where the authors begin revealing their biases by latching on to the fact that many religious independents love their new found freedom outside the confines of religion. This freedom is transformed into ‘they are sinners’ (usually sexual sin) and ‘they couldn’t cut it inside Christianity’ (not exact quotes; p. 11). “Guilt drove Christine Wicker, a journalist who covers the religious scene in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from the faith” (p. 10). The authors also latch onto John Loftus, a famed religious exiter who is critical of religion. Turns out, according to McKnight and Ondrey, the primary reason Loftus left Christianity wasn’t because the Christian claim that we need a savior is absurd or there is no evidence for a god, both things he specifically mentions, but because he was seduced by a former stripper and had an affair (p. 13). The authors go so far as to say that, despite the fact most of the conversion stories of exiters don’t mention sin, they know it is there, “My own intuition, and I did not find anyone speak in this way, is that the demand put on one’s life by Jesus, by the orthodox faith and by a local church’s expectations can provoke a crisis on the part of the person who wants to go her or his own way. I am suggesting that behind some of the stories is a desire to live as one wants, to break certain moral codes that are experienced as confining, and that were either forgotten when telling the story or were an un-acknowledged dimension of the experience” (pp. 45-46). So, even though exiters don’t usually claim sin as the cause, the authors know better: religious exiters are just sinners and can’t live righteously, so they leave!
Religious exiters are also different, according to the authors, because they are not characterized by what they are gaining but what they are leaving, “Conversions to the Christian faith are nearly always shaped by what one is gaining-forgiveness, heaven, moral transformation, meaning, peace, a new community, or joy. Conversions from the Christian faith are nearly always shaped by what one is leaving instead of what one is gaining” (pp. 46-47). So, secular humanists, who embrace a worldview that values humans and the human experience, are really just bitter losers who have given up all that is good in life, even though none of the accounts analyzed indicated as much. Additionally, while there is no discussion of Messianic Jews turning back to Judaism or Roman Catholic converts returning to evangelical Christianity or evangelical converts returning to Catholicism, the author has to mention that some who leave religions return, “It would be unfair to the evidence to suggest that all who walk away from the faith flourish in the land” (p. 61). According to the authors, secular individuals can’t be happy, so they end up turning back to religion quite frequently (remember, they don’t have the data to indicate frequencies), despite the fact none of the accounts they analyzed indicated as much.
In case you haven’t quite gotten the point that religious exiters just aren’t as good of people as are converts to religion and that, despite what the authors claimed at the beginning of the book that all conversions are apostasies and vice versa, the authors go out of their way to make sure you understand that “apostates” are different from “converts,” “Christian conversion is a spiritual phenomenon, and so the sacred stories of converts must be handled with the gloves of reverence. Ultimately, conversion is what happens between a whole person and the whole God. As such, conversion to Jesus is best defined as the transformation of identity in Christ, the conversion of a person in his deepest being; conversion means the transformation of an “I am who I am” to an “I am who I am in Christ” identity” (pp. 73-74). The implicit message here: “conversion” to religious independent doesn’t warrant treatment with reverence and it isn’t a “deepest being” conversion. It’s superficial and easily reversed.
This leads to another major problem with the book, in case you have already noticed it: Bias! I have to applaud the authors for at least trying to be understanding of people who don’t share their liberal evangelical Christian views (they don’t mention they are evangelical Christians explicitly until the last chapter, but it’s pretty obvious early on), “If mapping conversion theory shows anything… it shows the need for grace, humility, and openness to one another as we listen to and learn from one another’s stories. The sincerity of each converts’ (often opposite) experience underscores the need to learn from one another’s experience rather than denounce the other’s experience. Listening to the critique of those who leave our faith teaches us about our faith. Both converts and apostates shed light on faith” (p. 236). The authors try to be open-minded and objective, but that is clearly beyond their level of tolerance. Throughout the book the authors use parentheticals and short barbs to rail against everyone who is not a liberal evangelical Christian. They call the writings of atheists “tirades against the Christian faith” (p. 14), but don’t label similar criticisms of other religions tirades. They also call atheists “fundamentalists,” (p. 23), which is simply name calling without warrant. They dismiss creationism as a dogma (p. 21), illustrating their liberal tendencies and suggesting their doctrinal superiority. They claim evangelical churches are “saturated with former Roman Catholics” (p. 123), which does have some merit, but they overstate the case. According to recent Pew data, 10% of American adults are former Catholics, but 2.6% of the American population has converted to Roman Catholicism, including many evangelical Christians. The authors also claim Roman Catholicism doesn’t really teach doctrine or allow people to “know” Jesus (p. 139), which I’m sure Roman Catholics will find appealing. They even level their vitriol at the World Council of Churches, claiming it is seeking “unity at the expense of theological articulation” (p. 214). Basically, if you aren’t a liberal evangelical Christian who thinks exactly how the authors do, this book will find a way to criticize you. But it’s done with an ecumenical spirit, so don’t take offense.
It isn’t until the very end of the book that the authors admit they have an aim other than objective scientific research: advocacy, “We believe that pastors and church workers, to apply this to our own context of faith, need to become much more aware of conversion theory for this reason alone: conversions occur for a variety of reasons and, until ministers are aware of the amazing variety of those reasons, they will be unable to minister adequately to those with contexts and stories unlike the typical context and story at work in their own location of ministry” (pp. 234-235). In short, the authors want pastors and church leaders to be the go-to resources for people who are doubting (pp. 22-23). They wrote this book to serve as a resource for such people so they can help their acolytes stay evangelical Christians. In a sense, this is commendable: the authors are criticizing their own community by noting that among evangelical Christians, “Doubts cannot often be nursed in public without censure and without questions about one’s integrity” (p.54). In short, the book is designed to inform pastors of why people might leave religions with the hope that the pastors will be more understanding and hopefully be able to stop them.
From a social scientific standpoint, the book really has nothing to offer. The methodology is flawed, there are no contributions to theory (in fact, I don’t think the authors really understand what theory is; see p. 231), the book is in no way objective, and the ultimate goal is to keep people religious. If you are in a position to try to keep evangelical Christians part of the fold, you might find this book useful in that it will help you understand why some people want to leave. But I can’t think of another context where this book would be useful.
