Reason #1: “Teens’ and twentysomethings’ experience of Christianity is shallow.”

Reason #2: “Churches come across as antagonistic to science.”

I don’t make a habit of discussing religion on my blog and if reading this will boil your blood instead of add to the conversation, please feel free to skip out on the next couple of entries. This a long overdue story that I need to start telling.

Growing up in youth group, we were always lectured about how awful it was that kids would go off to college and then leave church. At the time I thought it was ridiculous that anyone would leave, but within three years I found myself standing on the stage in the sanctuary at my church graduation ceremony relieved that I wouldn’t have to enter those church doors for a long time.

How did that happened? Why did I have such a drastic change in heart? I’ve spent a long time trying to articulate what precisely pushed me away, so when the article “Six Reasons Young Christians Leave Church” by the Barna Group showed up in my RSS feed, it immediately identified with it because I lived their research.

This is the first of three posts breaking down each reason given by the Barna Group and talk about how my own experience reflected each of them.

Reason #1: “Teens’ and twentysomethings’ experience of Christianity is shallow.”

I was born into a very Christian family, so from the moment I left the womb I was in church. Flannel graphs, Sunday School, Big Church, the whole nine yards. From the church nursery all the way up through most of high school I was at church every time the doors were open. (Towards the end of high school I was there six times a week.) As my husband would say, “They learned me well.” By the time I was in early middle school I could give a full dissertation on any issue and perfectly repeat the canned answers about my faith that I had been fed from the moment I had been born.

So, when I got to youth group (grades 9-12) and the lessons didn’t go any deeper than “stay in church,” “don’t listen to secular music,” “don’t do drugs” and “don’t have sex,” I had a difficult time staying connected. I had learned all of that back in elementary school. Why are we still talking about this? I really needed leaders who would help me work through the questions that come with adolescence. I was wrestling with reality, mortality, myself, my body, my parents, and faith, and all they could talk about was how I needed to do my “devos”.

All the questions that are a part of being a teenager went unanswered. Why am I here? (“Because Jesus created us.”  Yeah, thanks. That doesn’t help me. Why am I actually here? Why do I matter at all? Why should I even bother living?) Why does what I do even matter? Why should I believe any of this? Why can’t I just go be a monk?

Anyone who remembers being a teenager understands that you go through a huge shift in how you understand life. Everything becomes much more important, serious, and you start to question everything. When no one addressed those kinds of questions or made room for us to at least dialogue about them, I started feeling discontent because no one cared about the questions, which caused me to believe that none of them really cared about what state of mind I was in.

Reason #2: “Churches come across as antagonistic to science.”

This, of the six reasons I’ll be talking about, was the least influential for me, but it was still was important. The place this problem showed up the most was how incredibly dogmatic my church was about creation.One of the reasons why I broke up with the previously mentioned Adamis because of our differing views on creation. He believed in creation evolution, which is where views of evolution and creation can intersect. It was completely incompatible with my views on creation at the time, so I blocked him out. I realize now how silly that was.I was not alone though because there was absolutely no room for that in the church I used to go to for other theories. There was zero discussion about them. If you didn’t believe in a literal 24-hour seven-day creation you may as well have said you weren’t Christian.

This extended into the rest of the science realm. For example, my church leaders were completely dismissive of things like global warming because they didn’t think “God would allow us to do that to ourselves”. And don’t even talk about the green movement because was all hogwash by those tree-hugging environmentalists who had anti-god agendas. The blogger over from Prove Me Wrong captured this perfectly:

“Climate change? Of course that was bunk. Just like evolutionists have some sort of God hating agenda and the scientific method is not capable of correcting for such biases, in the same way global warming types basically want to run our lives like Stalinist commissars. I will resist their encroachments on my liberty. [...] The lesson I’ve learned from my past is that rejecting the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is unlikely to lead to truth. Sure, it’s possible that they can all be wrong, but is it likely? And what method of knowing truth is more reliable than following scientific consensus? They’ll be wrong sometimes. But who won’t be wrong sometimes?”

The way I was taught displayed an unwillingness to listen to scientific advancements that make people slightly uncomfortable. They would simply brush them off and deny the need to protect our resources and respect the earth we live on. (It’s not easy being green!) I mean, because God wouldn’t actually let us be our own demise, so on with bulldozing the rainforests!

It is one more area where the Christians I knew were aggressive and unwilling to have an intellectual conversation. This is well known in secular circles as one of The Hot Button Topics that you shouldn’t bring up under any circumstances. There is something very wrong with that. When I started college I didn’t understand why people thought fundamentalists were close minded. This is a reason amoung many others.

Can’t we be adults about this? Can’t we sit down and hear each other out without attacking each other or immediately trying to shut down everyone else’s arguments? Can’t we engage and share our viewpoints and listen to each other? Can’t we try to learn about other people’s perspective and use that to understand other people better?

Contrary to the popular phrase, I promise your brain won’t fall out of your head if you dare to talk to someone honestly about a different view of how we all got here.

Next I’ll be covering the next two reasons: the unhealthy views toward sexuality and the difficulty of the exclusive nature of Christianity.

Photo credit: Flickr / Horia Varlan