Episode Details

Four particularly toxic ingredients make it especially hard for some (many?) Evangelicals to maintain their belief system beyond a few decades.

Christianity, in the West at least, is certainly experiencing a “great falling away”: churches closing, memberships dropping, people leaving the faith entirely. Some might conclude they’re leaving in order to better enjoy “sex, drugs and rock and roll.” But a closer look reveals that their departure has so much more to do with simply being unable to hold on to something that just produces so much doubt, internal conflict, cognitive dissonance, and challenges to personal integrity. And a variety of forms of religious abuse have certainly helped people out the doors.

We certainly found this to be the case for the four of our listeners whom we interviewed over the past four weeks. We learned that all four of them have rejected the form of Christian faith that they grew up with and held quite comfortably for a couple decades. Two of them no longer go to church at all, while a third one attends as an atheist. And none of them would again embrace the label “Evangelical.” But all four are still always listening, reading and talking about ….. Christian things. They’re still “scratching the itch”! In this episode, we distill some themes, commonalities, and lessons learned from those four conversations. Points that we covered include:

• the strange beliefs of their original Christian faith seemed to be so normal and acceptable at the time, but now they see moral atrocities, unscientific claims, philosophical paradoxes, and theological conflicts
• there are four “toxic ingredients” that need to be revised or gotten rid of:
  • inerrancy and infallibility of scripture
  • hell theology (esp. eternal conscious torment)
  • Penal Substitution
  • Christian exclusivism
• too many people don’t correctly understand in detail the origins of the Bible, and its human input
• inerrancy and infallibility is never mentioned in the Bible; Jesus often turned scripture upside-down; even people who claim to adhere completely to inerrancy/infallibility don’t take many parts of the Bible “literally”
• Peter Enns (

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