Janet Parshall Commentary

Losing My Religion

         In 1991, the rock band R.E.M. released a hit song called ‘Losing My Religion’.  While the lyrics play off of a Southern expression that refers to being frustrated and desperate, according to a major research organization there really are a lot of people losing their religion.

         The Pew Research Center surveyed 36 countries and found that many people are leaving their childhood religion.  They used the term “religion shifting” throughout the report and define that as a change between the religious group in which a person was raised and their religious identity as an adult.  They don’t use the term ‘conversion’ because a person could move from being religious as a child to now being ‘unaffiliated’.

         What Pew found was “that in some countries, changing religions is very rare.  In India, Israel, Nigeria and Thailand, 95% or more of adults say they still belong to the religious group in which they were raised. But across East Asia, Western Europe, North America and South America, switching is fairly common. For example, 50% of adults in South Korea, 36% in the Netherlands, 28% in the United States and 21% in Brazil no longer identify with their childhood religion”.

         What Pew found was “most of the movement has been into the category (called) religiously unaffiliated, which consists of people who answer a question about their religion by saying they are atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular.”  In other words, most of the switching is disaffiliation – people leaving the religion of their childhood and no longer identifying with any religion”.

         An example is Sweden where most were raised “Christian”, yet 29% of adults there would now describe themselves religiously as atheists, agnostics or “nothing in particular.”

         Sadly, Christianity stands out as the religion with the highest net losses due to religion switching in most of the countries studied. For example, in Germany, the ratio of people leaving Christianity to those joining is 19.7 to 1.0, meaning that 20 Germans raised as Christians no longer identify with the faith for every one individual who has converted to Christianity.

         Pew doesn’t offer reasons for people switching out of Christianity (or any other religion) but for followers of Jesus, this data serves as a major wake-up call for the Church to reinvigorate its commitment to evangelism, discipleship and missions. Spiritual growth only happens when sound doctrine is taught, where a passion to reach the lost in paramount and where ‘going and telling’ the Good News is a call for each one to reach one.

         At the core of those leaving Christianity is a personal failure to know Christ, deeply.  For those who walked away, did they have a vibrant prayer life?  Did they go to church, spend time daily in the Word and knew not just what they believed but why they believed it? Now more than ever, our mandate must be to “know Christ and make Him known.” 

Those are my thoughts.  I’m Janet Parshall