I was a teenage zombie

I’ve been asked to comment on a deconversion testimony. Peter Pike has already done an excellent post on the subject.

It’s a stereotypical deconversion testimony. And it’s striking how formulaic these deconversions stories generally are. A young man grows up in a legalistic, fideistic, insular Christian environment. At some point he’s exposed, for the first time in his adult life, to a teacher or writer who’s hostile to the Christian faith. The instant he encounters an opposing view, his childhood faith evaporates on contact. And he finds this a liberating experience.

This phenomenon raises a number of interesting questions:

1.It’s a mystery to me how any American living in the age of cable TV and the Internet could ever be that sheltered to begin with. You’d think these apostates were Amish farmhands.

Or, to vary the illustration, reading deconversion testimonies is like watching one of those post-apocalyptic SF movies in which, to survive a nuclear winter, the human race took refuge in a fallout shelter. Decades pass. The younger generation knows nothing about the outside world. The community is ruled by a dictatorial gerontocracy. The elders remember the truth, but, being corrupt and power-hungry, lie to the younger generation to keep them under their thumb. They assure the younger generation that the outside world is uninhabitable. The radiation would kill them. Or mutant animals would eat them alive. They are the last people on earth. To leave the shelter is forbidden, on pain of death. They must avoid contaminating the shelter.

But the young people, being naturally curious and insubordinate, defy their elders and stage an escape. When they emerge from the shelter, with secret police hot on their tail, they discover, to their shock and awe, that the outside world is a paradise on earth. A new Eden. What is more, they discover other human beings living on the surface!

The average apostate acts as if he’d been hoodwinked all these years. Kept in the dark. He acts as though, if the Bible were true, then everyone would believe the Bible was true.

When he then discovers the hitherto unsuspected existence of unbelievers, this is followed by a sense of betrayal and disillusionment. He says to his elders, “How could you lie to me! Why didn’t you ever tell me!”

2.As I’ve often said, apostasy is frequently the result of false expectations. If you entertain a false expectation, then sooner or later rude experience may dash your false expectations.

It’s not as if the Bible cultivates this expectation. It’s not as though the Bible paints a picture of a word in which everyone is a fellow believer. Bible history actually records the existence of unbelievers!

You have to be incredible naïve to think that no one has ever written a book before attacking the Bible or the Christian faith. Why does first-time exposure to this sort of material so often lead to instant loss of faith? Why does this catch the reader completely off-guard, as if he never imagined the possibility of someone attacking the Bible?

I think one reason is that a lot of folks read the Bible without bothering to apply it to themselves or the world around them. They don’t stop and ask whether there’s something in their own experience or observation that corresponds to what the Bible is describing. Somehow, in their reading of Scripture, they compartmentalize what the Bible says about the world from the world around them.

3.The attraction of a deconversion testimony is emotional. It appeals to someone who had the same sort of experience. There’s the shock of recognition: “Gee, I can relate to that! He might as well be talking about me!” This creates a sense of camaraderie between the writer and the reader.

At least, it has that effect in the case of readers and writers who share a common experience.

But by the same token, it doesn’t have the same effect on readers like me who had a very different experience growing up.

I didn’t have much to rebel against as a kid. I didn’t feel repressed. I guess I suffer from the fact that I was too well-adjusted to identify with the experience of the apostate. So deconversion testimonies have no emotional traction for a reader like me. I find them unintentionally comical. I wonder how anyone could be that clueless to begin with.

For folks who pride themselves on being freethinkers, this groupthink mentality ought to disturb them. The degree to which their apostasy is formulaic, stereotypical, culturally conditioned, should be deeply disturbing.

4. Another stereotypical feature of deconversion testimonies is their very wooden approach to the inerrancy of Scripture. They think the Bible must be in error unless every speech is a full, verbatim transcript of what was said. Somehow, they can’t wrap their head around the idea that a Bible writer might summarize or paraphrase what was said.

They think the Bible must be in error unless every quote is a verbatim transcription of the source. Somehow, they can’t wrap their head around the idea that a Bible writer might paraphrase another writer, or combine quotes from two or more writers.

They think the Bible must be in error unless every narrative is strictly sequential. Somehow they can’t wrap their head around the idea that a writer might arrange some of his material topically rather than chronologically.

They make no allowance for hyperbole, round numbers, or numerology. They make no allowance for narrative compression. Or paradox.

Put another way, they read the Bible at the level of a child. The simplistic literality of a child who’s too young to comprehend verbal shortcuts, figures of speech, or double entendres.

In other words, a lot of apostates a functionally illiterate. They know nothing about the art of writing. About basic literary techniques which are frequently put to use in expository writing.

5.So often they don’t even bother to read conservative Christian scholarship. They only read one side of the argument: the liberal side.

Or, by the time they do get around to reading the conservative side of the argument, it’s too late. By then they’re already committed to their defection. By then it’s a question of saving face. How to rationalize their apostasy.

So even if they do read some competent conservative writers, they automatically dismiss their explanations as special pleading. They discount whatever a conservative writer has to say based on his tainted apologetic motives. Anyone who presumes to defend the Bible is suspect for that very reason. And somehow they manage to exempt opponents of Christianity from the same suspicion.

6. Apostates also suffer from the “grass is greener” syndrome. They feel emotionally and culturally deprived. All the fun stuff they never had a chance to do. And they’re in a hurry to catch up.

There are, however, lots of folks who come out of the opposite background. People who know what it’s like to grow up in the moral vacuum of atheism.

7.I’ll finish with a few suggestions. Although there’s nothing a parent can do guarantee that his kids will remain in the faith, you can take some precautionary measures:

i) Choose your battles with care. Don’t give your kids too many things to rebel against. The more things you give them to rebel again, the more likely they are to rebel. Don’t load them down with unbiblical restrictions.

ii) In the nature of the case, happy people are not as restive as mad or sad people. For example, some parents treat church attendance as an onerous duty. Like eating your turnips and parsnips and spinach.

But if your kids hate church, then as soon as they learn how to drive or leave home, they’ll turn their back on church and never look back.

Are you kids miserable in church? Why? Try to find out. Try to do something about it.

iii) The world likes to glamorize evil. By contrast, you should expose your kids to the ugly underbelly of evil. Do so in a controlled environment. Take them to shelters for battered women. Or prison ministries. Or night-watch ministries. Expose them to the violence and despair of a godless lifestyle.

For every glittering Vegas casino there’s a seedy Vegas pawnshop. You can’t have one without the other.

iv) Teach them basic reading skills. They should read some of the following books:

Craig Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of the Gospels

V. Philips Long, The Art of Biblical History

Leland Ryken, Words of Delight: A Literary Introduction to the Bible

Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative

v) And, of course, they should become acquainted with some standard apologetic literature. There’s a lot of find online material.