John Marriott is far from the first researcher to look into the process of deconversion, nor is he the most published researcher in that field. Likely that honor goes to the German researcher, Heinz Streib who has been researching and publishing on the subject since the early 2000s.
Nevertheless, Marriott is probably the most visible researcher in the field, having done his dissertation on the subject in which he developed a stage model of deconversion which has not visibly been done in the bulk of the research on the subject (more on this later). Marriott has also published two books on the subject, in addition to a free e-book which may be downloaded from his personal website, and spoken extensively on the subject both on his own podcast and in numerous interviews (both with Christian and atheist interviewers).
As for Marriott’s credentials, he holds his PhD in intercultural studies, which he gained on the back of his dissertation on Christian deconversion, and is attached as a director of Intercultural Studies at Biola University, and teaches at the Talbot School of Theology.
His most recent book, The Anatomy of Deconversion, was published three years ago now, and outlines his model of deconversion, expanding on it with his own theological and philosophical thoughts.
The Theology
Marriott is an excellent researcher and writer, but he has never made any pretenses as regards his personal biases. His first published work from 2019, titled A Recipe for Disaster utilizes his research to instruct Christian parents and ministers in the sorts of things that increase the probability of a person leaving the faith, with suggestions on how to avoid such things. The audience for Recipe is Christians, and his latest book, The Anatomy of Deconversion is similarly aimed at a Christian readership. In the initial chapters, Marriott outlines the awkward theological dilemma that deconversion poses: were these deconverts “saved” and then lost their salvation? The frightening implication for Christians being that perhaps you (the Christian) will be the next to apostatize and lose salvation with the proverbial Sword of Damocles dangling ever above your head.
The second possibility Marriot explores is that these apostates were never “saved” to begin with. The implications of this for the Christian are only slightly less ominous. If one can never lose one’s salvation, this may be a relief, but given that these former Christians were truly convinced of their status as born-again, heaven-bound believers, is it possible that you (the Christian) could be similarly deceiving yourself? The thought might result in something like “Rapture Anxiety,” wherein the person questioning his or her salvation is in a constant state of anxiety as to whether they are truly saved at all.
The third possibility (and one not held by very many theologians) is that these former Christians have never lost their salvation at all. They have lost their self-identification as Christians, but they will be redeemed nonetheless and have merely drifted away from the truth.
Marriott never fully resolves these theological concerns, he just outlines them and admits his own befuddlement at the conflict.
Worth mentioning in connection to this (and Marriott makes this point as well) is that the common accusation from Christians toward ex-Christians is that they were never sincere believers at all. This is a refrain which becomes tiresome to former Christians who are public about their religious exit. These ex-Christians show their receipts for the sincerity of their beliefs in one of three ways. They either explain the contents of their beliefs (I believed in salvation by grace through faith, in the divinity of Christ, etc.), they recount religious experiences they had (speaking in tongues, feeling the spirit within them, etc.), or they recall the many religious deeds they did (preaching, praying, Bible reading, participation in miraculous healing activities, etc.).
The conclusion of the former Christian is frequently a resounding, “If I wasn’t Christian, then no one is.”
The Model of Deconversion
I should begin by noting that Marriott’s findings included something which was by no means a unique observation: that deconverts tend to come from Fundamentalist backgrounds. The difficulty with this observation is defining Fundamentalism.
Marriott uses Olson’s definition, which includes six features, I will summarize as follows:
- Increasing the amount of “essential” beliefs for being qualified as a Christian.
- “Biblical Separation” meaning that Christians are discouraged from association or interaction with any individuals or media outside of their belief system.
- A negative attitude toward contemporary culture, and progress away from cultural traditions and norms.
- An emphasis on verbal inspiration and technical inerrancy of scripture.
I have synthesized a few of Olson’s features together for simplicity’s sake. Olsen lists specific beliefs Fundamentalists add to the “essentials”, and lists several specific things they oppose, but we can probably guess at what those may be. Suffice it to say, Fundamentalism is notable for its narrowing of acceptable discourse, a sort of total certainty or high confidence in its correctness and its authority to define what is correct, and its complexity in terms of essentials.
Adams (2009) somewhat simplifies his definition of Fundamentalism to emphasize certainty as its primary feature. Adams suggests that there is a sort of comfort in the certainty that one is entirely correct without the possibility of error or doubt, and that everyone else is wrong. The fear of stepping outside of these boundaries is the insecurity which comes with uncertainty. Adams says that for a Fundamentalism, the options are either Fundamentalism, or Nihilism.
Having completed his review of the theological difficulties related to deconversion, Marriott begins to talk about his own research and the resulting model first outlined in his dissertation on the topic in 2014. Marriott uses a Grounded Research method (meaning that he was not testing a pre-existing theory on deconversion, but rather doing the interviews and gathering the data in order to form a new theory) to develop a model of deconversion based on a series of interviews with deconverts. In this book, Marriott begins by identifying factors which contribute to deconversion. The first he identifies is the failure of the church environment, including hurtful actions of Church leaders and of fellow Christians and the way in which the Congregation responds to these hurtful actions. The second he identifies is disappointment with God. After this, Marriott, like Streib (2021) and Pérez and Vallières (2019), identifies certain cognitive factors with deconversion. Marriott specifically finds that problems with the Bible are prominent objections to the Christian religion. The specific Biblical objections identified by Marriott include the problem of inerrancy, morally objectionable material, and the scientific evidence for Darwinian Evolution. This attribution to Biblical problems aligns with the findings of Starr et al (2019), and in regards to problems with Creationism versus Evolutionism, is well supported by the research of Fetters (2014) and Paul (Zuckerman, 2010). Marriott’s next contributing factor is the influence of atheists in cultivating doubts, especially aided by the availability of anti-Christian material and individuals on the internet. This attribution to internet usage as a contributing factor in deconversion is supported by the work of Paul McClure (2017), who concludes that internet usage increases the probability of “tinkering.” Says McClure, “Tinkering means that people feel they’re no longer beholden to institutions or religious dogma …Today, perhaps in part because many of us spend so much time online, we’re more likely to understand our religious participation as free agents who can tinker with a plurality of religious ideas—even different, conflicting religions—before we decide how we want to live.” (McClure, 2017).
After identifying these common religious objections, Marriott then develops a model of deconversion in his paper. His model breaks down into five stages. The first of these stages is Crisis followed by the second stage of Truth Seeking. These initial two stages are nearly identical to what has long been recognized in religious conversion modeling, beginning as early as William James (1902). James accorded the impetus for religious seeking as a result of a deeply affecting numinous experience which results in either a “sick soul” response, wherein the person feels convicted of sin, evil, or various personal failures, and pursues religion as an antidote to these failures; or to a “healthy mind,” wherein the person finds value in religion as a method of maintaining personal harmony (James, 1902). This model has long been supported by researchers such as Lofland and Stark (1965), whose acclaimed conversion model began with a feeling of deep instability followed by a period of “seeking” (Lofland and Stark, 1965). Marriot’s deconversion model is similar, in that the individual discovers a problem which appears to be irreconcilable within that person’s religious context, and consequently begins seeking for solutions external to the religion.
The third stage of Marriot’s model is the individual’s attempt to retain his or her religious belief. This is followed by stage 4, wherein the person becomes “agnostic,” insofar as he or she enters the mindset that they cannot know the truth about religion or beliefs. The final stage is a transition to atheism, which is gradual and comes as a sort of “dawning realization” that he or she does not believe.
Advice and Consolation
Because Marriott is writing to a Christian audience, he follows his model by some words to his concerned readership. He repeats the advice available in his previous book Recipe for Disaster in how certain teachings and practices in the church tend to increase the probability of deconversion, and he offers advice for how to cultivate a healthy faith.
His list of things to avoid includes an admonishment to avoid dogmatic instruction, burdening Christians with a multitude of things they feel they must affirm to be part of the club (perhaps chief among these is a rigid view of Biblical inerrancy, cited as the most common objection given by former believers), to provide instruction on the history and composition of scripture such that the Christians are not surprised by revelations from outside the church on how the Bible came together and connects to history, and exposing Christians to the criticisms of those outside the religion such that they are not caught off-guard by a surprising new objection to belief.
In the realm of cultivating faith, Marriott suggests that churches respect reason as a tool to truth, but not at the expense of revelation, that the theology taught to Christians transcends the very basic “sin-to-salvation” narrative, that Christian parents and leaders behave in ways which avoid hypocrisy and enhance their credibility, and that Apologetics be utilized modestly and appropriately within the church.
Marriott ends the book by sharing several stories of reconversion, real stories of individuals who left the faith, became committed atheists, and then returned to the faith. Here Marriott makes the point that the faith to which these reconverts return looks very different from the faith which they left.
Takeaway
As a deconversion researcher myself, the observations and findings recorded by Marriott in this book were in direct alignment with what I have found in my own work. Marriott did not pull from the research of others in his work to a great degree, possibly because his initial research was done in 2014, slightly before the boom in deconversion research.
I could not help but make a few comparisons between Marriott’s methods and parameters and my own work. Marriott includes in his sample 24 deconverts. Notably, the age range around time of deconversion is similar to my own findings: ages 30 to 55. This is not, by numbers, the average age of exit from religion (between 14 and 20), but is the age range from which deconversion stories are most likely to come.
Marriott includes only those individuals who were once members of evangelical or fundamentalist churches in his research. The narrowing of the field to only these two specific forms of Christianity can yield important data, as it gives very good information about what kinds of experiences those two types of backgrounds create in the deconversion process.
However, looking at Marriott’s results might lead to the impression that deconverts *only* come from those specific backgrounds.
In my research, I broadened the scope a bit. If the person claiming to have deconverted from Christianity came from a highly unorthodox background, I would exclude them from study (generally because what they described better fit the definition of a cult than it did a church). However, I included individuals Marriott probably would have rejected, such as former Catholics and former Seventh-day Adventists. As a result, I found that rates of deconversion are highest from strongly charismatic church backgrounds and from Catholicism (however, one finds deconversion from all corners of the Evangelical church as well).
Marriott looks for specific criteria in deconverts to include their experiences in his overall data set.
This includes a distinct conversion experience. I take exception to this point specifically because my findings suggest that the majority of deconverts have grown up in a religious environment and identified as Christian by default.
Now in most of these cases the person can identify a commitment experience, where they said a prayer or answered an alter call upon which event they would identify as “born again,” however few of the stories I’ve surveyed have undergone a transition through a conversion model such as the ones developed by Rambo.
I’ve considered this fact that one tends to more fully commit to a community in which one was already immersed, as opposed to entering that community as an outsider, to be significant in modeling and predicting deconversion.
Marriott lumps all religiously unaffiliated individuals into the “religious none” category. I find this unhelpful because I think it is important to make a distinction between unaffiliated or disaffiliated (exiting religion but not taking an atheist or agnostic identity) from deconverts-proper.
When I use the term “none” I mean someone who takes no interest in religious matters, or does not adopt an identity which in any way commits them to a stance on religion.
The forces and conditions which lead to disaffiliation and those which lead to deconversion ought to be distinguished from one another.
Marriott cites statistics that suggest American youth are exiting the church at record numbers.
However, most Deconversion testimonials available in the form of forums, books, blogs, podcasts, and YouTube videos (my primary sources because of their easy accessibility) place their deconversion during their adult years.
If the majority of religious Exodus is happening in the teenage years, why are most stories coming from adults?
My guess is this: most long-term religious commitments are made during adolescence, a fact that has been noted repeatedly over the last 100 years of conversion research. Those who abstain during adolescence have simply failed to commit, and are therefore not facing the crisis that comes when one is fully invested in a Christian identity and then loses that identity.
While the teenager may face some difficulty associated with exiting a youth group or strained relationships with the immediate family, studies suggest that the challenging of standards and norms during adolescence is frequently reinforced by an increase in respect from one’s peer group.
In summary, one does not undergo a severe “deconversion crisis” when one fails to commit in adolescence, but the experience of abandoning a religious identity and community in adulthood results in the kind of trauma that instigates a public voicing of one’s deconversion experience.
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