Reverend Dr. Frederick W. Schmidt, Jr. cannot believe there’s so much press about the Clergy Project.
First, he blows off the numbers like they’re no big deal:
… “The Clergy Project,” an organization formed to assist those who are confronting a crisis of faith, reports that it has all of 240 members. That’s hardly a tsunami and it’s hardly anything new.
… but he’s going to write a whole article about it, anyway.
That’s not the point, though. Schmidt thinks he knows why so many religious leaders lose their faith. And he thinks the Christian church can do something about it.
He’s wrong on both counts.
Check out his grossly misguided reasons for why clergy members leave the faith:
Some clergy who stop believing never did believe.
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Some fail to believe at all or struggle to continue believing thanks to churches themselves.
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Some struggle with immature and simplistic assumptions about God, providence, and suffering that persist long after they have pursued a formal education.
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Some struggle to integrate what they have learned in seminary.
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… There is a difference between studying God and experiencing God.
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… Some clergy cease to believe because life in the church is hard.
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Others fail to reckon with the fact that questions of meaning, morality, and value are not just a religious problem. They are part and parcel of the human experience.
Schmidt is so far off the mark that it’s, frankly, insulting.
People have different reasons for leaving the faith. But the common thread I hear from them — since, you know, I actually talk to them — is that they finally realized that the Christian story they had been told ever since they were children was just not true.
They didn’t know it until they finally confronted the stories directly (in seminary school) or began teaching it to their congregations. Their options were to preach things (like the existence of Heaven) that they knew weren’t real — or leave the pulpit altogether. Many brave people have done the latter. Many more people haven’t been able to bring themselves to do that yet. Hopefully, they will soon.
But to suggest most of them left the church because they were bad seminary students, or because they were never really True ChristiansTM in the first place, or because their churches somehow failed them, or because they never really understood the nature of god, or because they never truly experienced god, or — what the fuck — because church is “hard,” totally ignores the elephant in the room.
They left because they discovered that the Bible is a work of fiction.
They were as Christian as you could get — they had their Born-Again moments, they sincerely prayed, they believed god guided them through life, they asked god for wisdom before making all crucial decisions, they “felt the spirit”… hell, some of them even spoke in tongues (and can still do so today if they feel like it). They were real, honest, genuine Christians, no doubt about it.
You want proof? The Clergy Project website shares their stories! I know this because I did what Schmidt was too lazy to do — I went to the freaking website and read their testimonials directly. I didn’t skip a single one.
Here’s what the former pastors said regarding why they left the faith. See if you can find the trend:
In 2006, I approached a senior pastor and friend and told him I was struggling with my faith. He suggested I talk to our Bishop. The Bishop was concerned enough for me that he thought I should take a break from ministry. During the break I had plenty of time to think. I explored philosophy, science, epistemology and finally, I read a book called The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. I will never forget how it awakened my mind and how it stirred a deep curiosity within me. I desperately needed to know more about who I am, where I really came from, and how it is that, as humans, we have evolved to be the way we are. I started to see that my model of the world was not working.
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As a child, embracing the truth as presented to me by parents, pastors and Sunday school teachers seemed reasonable. But ultimately, a healthy hunger for truth combined with a fundamentalist background drove me to try to make logical sense of the bible. Early on I could see that the infallible word of god had many faults. It was the process of bible study over the decades that slowly but surely delivered me to final state of unbelief…
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I was a fifth-generation Baptist minister, ordained at age 18, while in college. I served until age 32 when I left the ministry and the church to get a PhD in Clinical Psychology. I had already completed a three-year seminary degree following college, which only increased my doubts about the authenticity of the theology I had learned from childhood. Leaving the ministry was not an easy decision to make since all my friends and family were in the church. But it was a decision I ultimately HAD to make if I didn’t want to risk being publicly phony and privately cynical. I became an agnostic, then an atheist, NOT because I hadn’t read the Bible, but because I had! An atheist, by the way, is simply someone who does not believe in a supernatural being. I am convinced that the evidence supports that view. All religion suffers from being bound by unchanging myth.
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… over time I began to realize that the ‘truth’ I was preaching wasn’t so true. I resisted my doubts at first, but the nagging in my brain wouldn’t stop. So I embarked on a journey of researching and discovering that what I had believed for so long wasn’t true.
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The Clergy Forum offers an opportunity to find acceptance and understanding within an online community of people who are or have been in the same seemingly impossible situation of propagating a faith in which they no longer believe. Unlike within one’s religious community, one can express one’s deepest convictions without fear of judgment.
You would think a “Director of Spiritual Formation and Associate Professor of Christian Spirituality at Southern Methodist University” would know how to do research that basic…
Schmidt acknowledges — briefly, at the end — that some people may have left the faith because they no longer believed the Bible was true, but it’s obvious he considers that reason a footnote, not the main culprit. He believes a good church can somehow alleviate these clergy members’ issues and cause them to want to stay in the pulpit. Of course that’s not true. The church can’t magically make the Bible tell the truth any more than a god can answer your prayers.
