Non-Christian Asian Americans and Religious Tolerance

In earlier posts I’ve shown how difficult it is to get a good survey of religion among Asian Americans, and I’ve shown what we sort of know about the actual religious prevalence of this racial group. The one group I have neglected to mention are the religiously-affiliated non-Christians. In the following pie charts I illustrate data using the Pew Religious Landscape Survey 2008 of the estimated distribution of major world religions for the entire sample and within the Asian American sample. As you recall this was only translated into Spanish so, the Asian American findings pertain to those who are comfortable answering a survey over the phone in English. [Read more...]

Why Do Christians Leave the Faith? The Relative Unimportance of Non-Christians

Part 4 in a series on deconversion.

Going into this study of deconversion, I figured that interactions and relationships with non-Christians would be an important cause for people leaving. After, we’re sociologists, and we study how peer and friend relationships affect so many things.

However, in the narratives themselves, there were surprisingly few references to non-Christians leading the writers away from faith. We counted only eight in the fifty testimonies that we read. For example, one writer had a non-Christian friend loan him a book arguing against Christianity. Another had a family member who advocated against Christianity.

Far more commonly, non-Christians were mentioned as supporting the writers’ decisions after they had left Christianity. For example, the website from which we drew the narratives endorsed and supported the decisions of former Christians, but it did not seem to initially bring about these decisions.

As such, the narrative writers rarely described individuals outside of the church as helping bring about their deconversion. Rather, they described new relationships with non-Christians (exemplified by their participation in an online community for deconverts) as the consequence, not cause, of changes in their beliefs.

Why might non-Christians be mostly absent from these deconversion stories? One answer might be the insular social networks of some Christians, for several writers spoke of having had relatively few interactions or relationships with non-Christians. For example, a woman raised in the church wrote that she did not even know what the word “atheist” meant until she was in her twenties.

Generally speaking, then, [Read more...]

Dead Man Walking: An Evening with Sr. Helen Prejean in Durham

At the end of her talk to a packed house at Trinity United Methodist Church in Durham, North Carolina, on Friday, December 2, Sister Helen Prejean (whose work on death row was made into the award-winning film Dead Man Walking) lifted her arms out wide and said, “What does the Gospel of Jesus say? We have to show compassion for the victims of murder on one side of the cross and for the perpetrators of murder on the other side of the cross.”

The closest I have come to knowing a victim of murder and the perpetrator of that murder occurred around the death of Eve Carson, the UNC student body president who was murdered in the spring of 2008.

I was just finishing my course preparation when I received the email that the body of a murdered victim found near campus had been identified as the beloved student body president. Shocked and horrified, I stumbled toward my class on that bright sunny day wondering, [Read more...]

A Story of Turning the Other Cheek

A problem with moral standards, whether rooted in Christianity or otherwise, is how to express them in a cultural context. That is, are we doing something because we think it’s right to do or because it’s socially-normative behavior. (And I realize that the two need not be separate). As such, sometimes we understand the morality of behavior more clearly when it goes against cultural expectations.

Here’s a story from NPR several years ago that illustrates it. It tells of how a man responded to being mugged. The “proper” response to being mugged is to 1) be safe and 2) contribute to the mugger getting caught or hurt. Instead, this victim expressed love.

It starts: [Read more...]

Confession: It’s Cheaper than Therapy




Lots of Christians are a part of accountability groups, of course. [Read more...]