I remember leaving the Catholic Church at the age of 16. It was way before the sexual abuse and other scandals came out, but I just hated the way the church treated women.
It took another 15 years before I realized (or admitted) that I was an atheist.
Every one of my siblings (born between 1952 and 62) left the RCC by the age of 20. We each call ourselves different things now (atheist, "theological Switzerland", Zen Buddhist, etc), but they all add up to non-theist. Ditto my nieces and nephew,though a couple of them went to Catholic schools. And, yes, my generation's deconversions happened long before the sexual abuse scandals. Our old diocese, Oakland, California, declared bankruptcy last May, and its founding bishop, Floyd Begin was named as an abuser in Dec 2022. All of the two generations were well out by then. Fuck the RCC and the horse they rode in on.
My siblings are still churchgoers, my brother because he likes theology (he self-taught ancient Greek to translate the Bible), my sister because she likes her "church family" and the good works her church does. But in my line there are only atheists, right down to the grandkids. A couple are into Buddhist philosophy, but most ignore religion entirely.
That's fascinating! My siblings and I basically noped out of the religion by age 11 or 12. I was more academically inclined so took a minor in college in Religious Studies (academic study of religions) and a couple of relevant languages to go with it. It still fascinates me how people get, umm, sucked into religious belief. The thing that Christianity uses about the "4 to 14" window? They know damned well that if they had to wait til kids began thinking for themselves to push their mythology, nobody would accept the nonsense. (See above. My siblings and I were all forced to formally comply til we Got The Hell Out of the family, but stopped believing by 6th grade mostly.)
Hmmm. At least in my generation, we didn't get much critical thinking, at home or in catechism. Nor, I think, in catholic schools. It might be different now. As far as losing the customer base, yes. Look at the stats cited in this post. 6.5 de-conversions from catholicism for every in-conversion. Also, I remember reading a while ago that ten percent of the US population is catholic in name only ("cultural catholics"--and I've run into a shit-ton of them!) but never go to church, donate, send their kids to catholic schools, agree with the RCC on anything much, etc. In other words, absent populations of immigrants from traditionally catholic countries (the Philippines, Latin America, eg), the number of people claiming catholicism would be something like half of what they have. Also, if you were *ever* baptised catholic, the RCC claims you as one. It's virtually impossible to get taken off the rolls. Three of my siblings and I tried--our letters requesting removal were sent the same week, even--and none of us ever got removed. You apparently have to file suit against the Vatican or something, and who can afford that?
Je ne sais pas si tu as déjà lu cet article, alors juste au cas où. Modalités et conséquences juridiques sont les parties les plus intéressantes mais j'ignore à quel point, la seconde peut s'appliquer au Québec.
Huh. True. (Though my ability to read French sucks and I had to translate the debaptism article on La Wiki into English.) The Oakland diocese probably just tossed our letters in the circular file.
Sorry I'm late, gang ... slept in ... [rubs half a sand dune from his eyes!]
Religion in general and Christianity in particular are anachronisms, buried in the past and mostly incapable of dragging themselves into the ever-changing present. They carry with them the biases and bigotries of millennia ago, along with an insistence on patriarchy and "leadership" based on authority, rather than on actual capability. Religion has managed to maintain its position at least in part by keeping its congregants indoctrinated, ill-informed, and SCARED. Scared of what? OTHERS, and especially the LGBTQ+ community.
It's taken a while, but despite their efforts, a great number of us have managed to wake up (does that make us "WOKE?!? 😁) and recognize the foolishness and failure that religion is and have gotten ourselves shut of it, whether to shrug irrational belief off and become a "none" or declare openly and defiantly, "I am an ATHEIST." More of us either are or know someone in the LGBTQ+ community, and funny thing: we discovered that they aren't that different (if different at all) from us, and that they're not the horrors that preachers and ministers and imams would have us believe they are. Somewhere along that line, we decided, "It does not compute," and we left religion and its irrationality behind.
So, folks are waking up to the heartlessness of religion. At least, the heartlessness of religious leadership.
It is heartening to see that the complete improbability of it all is the leading cause of religious desertion, though. Of course religious folks will continue to claim that we are all just trying to get away with sinning or their favorite excuse, you were hurt by “no true Scotsman” bad people in the church and the religion is still sound. Anything to hide their discomfort from anyone not believing the nonsense.
Atheism predates all religion. It survived the Dark Ages and continues to flourish. Christians might kill the unbelievers but they cannot kill the idea.
I always find it amusing when I hear non-religious people claiming to have 'found' god. They never explain where he's been all this time. They never offer evidence of his existence to back up their claim.
My take is that it simply sounds like they were at a low point in their life and were found by a sanctimonious scammer who exploited them and their troubles.
There is an urban fantasy writer who played with this concept. One of her heroine has to pick up a lost sock if she wants a shortcut to her destination (Vancouver, Canada to San Francisco or Los Angeles in mere minutes).
The religious right will deny that religious trauma is real. Here is direct evidence that it is.
Is it good for a young woman's mental health for her religion to tell her that she is only good for pumping out babies for an authoritarian man? No.
Is it good for a teenager's mental health for their religion to tell them their natural sexual curiosity is evil and need to be suppressed? No.
Is it good for a trans child's mental health to be ejected from the only home they know because their religion says that's the proper way to treat who they are? Oh fuck no.
Is religion bad for people's mental health? The answer is an unequivocal yes.
I seem to be getting a lot of mileage out of the following lately:
"We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid."
-- Christopher Hitchens, from his book "Letters to a Young Contrarian." Published October 17th, 2001
Call me an optimist, but perhaps humanity if finally, finally starting to shake off its need for childiish fantasies and the empty promises of religion.
"20% said their churches had become too political, and I predict that number will only get larger in the years to come."
As I've said many times, I liked religion a lot more before it became a political party, and I liked the Republicans a lot more before they became a religion. And now that the Republicans seem to be promoting "Christians for the anti-Christ for president", this seems to be even more of the case.
Subjugation. Submission. Not my will but thine be done. This is the kind of peace that religions offer us, and it is the reason why we must reject them utterly.
To the "nones" who have ditched the labels and institutions, yet cling to the belief in the Christian god:
I strongly encourage you to read the bible from Genesis to Revelation. That by itself will demolish any lingering notions you may have toward "the spirit in the sky" and start you on the path to reason, away from any and all superstition.
From what I've read, and snickered about, some religious leaders have determined that doubling down on the hate and misogyny is somehow the way to restore their numbers. What's not to snicker at when they decide the way to go is to do more of what is driving people away?
It's probably not as dumb as that. What they are doing is maybe more analogous to a company focusing on the demographic that actually regularly buys the product, rather than catering to the demographic that says they like the product, but then never puts any money out for it.
I forget about the two year delay and I didn't realize comic Liz is 4 when yesterday Liz said this as a six year old. 4 year olds know how to write, right?
As encouraging as these figures are, the other thing to consider is the way the churches are being distilled down to the true believers to whom any kind of compromise is unthinkable. These people have convinced themselves their religion entitles them to a say in other people's personal choices. There is a growing tendency in the Christian-nationalism movement to do so by force if they ever get the chance. Reasonable people just can't allow that crowd to win because, although it is ultimately self-defeating, a determined minority can cause no end of problems for the majority.
Protestant pastors who run real estate developments disguised as churches.
Televangelists who grift for money for private jets, air-conditioned doghouses, and to pay off hookers and angry church secretaries they raped/bopped.
Catholic priests who molested children.
Mormon deacons who worship and glorify gaining wealth (and sometimes polygamy).
Muslim imams who tell their flock to go commit suicide bombings, and then watch the action from an air-conditioned and heavily guarded compound in Pakistan.
and
Buddhist monks who say "everything is as it should be."
Yeah, that's another bizarre touch...the anti-Semites are obsessed with that one.
I just saw on CNN that anti-Semitic propaganda is reaching new highs in low. One of the three leading groups in pushing that garbage out is the "Goyim Defense League."
I bet the only place they fight battles is on the Internet. If they actually had to fight people on the street, they'd hide behind the army of cops at the demonstration.
Creationists supporting oil lobbyists as well as extorting money from state governments, overworking and underpaying their employees, and begging courts for the right to discriminate against gays, trans, Jews, and others without accountability (And yes, I'm talking about Dumb Idiot Ken Ham here!).
Yeah, but they only read the Bible when they're at a dinner and, as Mickey Mantle said while drunk at an event, "Here's the f****** preacher" comes up to give the invocation.
Other than that, they just read corporate reports and business magazines.
I understand why the reason for people to leave the church is their treatment of LGBTQ people. I know that the bigotry was out there in most religions when I was growing up but I didn't really see it that much. It was the "hate the sin, love the sinner" mentality I guess. Today the religious hate of LGBTQ people has become a political issue. Mostly because the Republicans have fully embraced religious hate as a way to shore up their numbers since just catering to the ultra-wealthy is not a winning strategy. As such, the Republican party has done what it always did - scare people with the oppressed-group-du-jour. This predictably has created some backlash, just has hating on POC did 60 years ago.
The vast majority of US *liberals* would not have approved of gay marriage up to about 2010. Before that, outside of gay communities themselves the 'mainstream liberal' view from 70s-80s onward was, at best, civil unions for all. Bill Clinton authored don't ask don't tell...and that was as far as he was willing to politically fight. Not even civil unions. Hilary, when running against Obama, was civil unions for all.
So bigotry for sure, and not just limited to conservative evangelicals. But I'd draw a distinction between that and the hate the right-wing is showing today. Most of the folks I'm talking about happily interacted with gay people on an equal and socially accepted footing - they just didn't think through the implications of what it meant for society to deny gays the institutions straight people had. This is in contrast to the folks who *refuse to serve* gay couples even today, or the preachers who call for them to be put to death. That sort of sentiment, AFAIK, has not occurred in any great amount on the left since before the roaring (19)20s. The GOP and conservatives have predominantly owned gay hate for the past century.
There's a reason why "altar boy jokes of yore" have the names of Father O'Reilly, Father Gahagan, etc. in them. Not because they're made up, but because there's truth in the joke. Sexual abuse in the Catholic religion was the worst-kept secret for eons
As for my personal tale, I was not raised in a church (I always tell people that I was raised amongst Catholics and then when I moved to the South, I am now amongst Baptists). My parents were agnostic; my father being an "excommunicated Catholic" for marrying my non-Catholic mother in a Presbyterian church (he's yet to receive the letter almost 55 years later). Both my parents were dropped off at church and picked up later with their parents never attending and they vowed to never do that to me. I did attend church with neighbors or friends if they went, but it was never ingrained in me. I thought it was dumb and didn't understand - even as a pre-adolescent - how people could attend a church and be "non-churchlike". I saw the hypocrisy early on. I didn't not get suckered in.
When I was younger I told people I was "agnostic" or "humanitarian" (when in actuality I was pretty sure I was atheist but didn't want to deal with the scorn of not at least being "spiritual", especially in the South), but the past 5 years I have embraced my atheism and now call myself an, "anti-christofascist humanitarian".
Churches have been driving away members for some time now via a combination of factors, including a number of issues that crop up in the Bible itself and are addressed, but most churches don't seem to adhere to. I suspect that the hypocrisy is starting to really wear, and well, that's never been a good look for anyone.
The truth is, people don't need their local church as an excuse to meet socially anymore, and most folks are tired of the Sunday Morning Fashion Show. For most people life is hard enough, and churches haven't been doing much of anything to make it easier, so it's only to be expected that folks aren't interested in staying with it anymore. With all the other options around, folks have started looking for more sensible cost/benefit ratio ways to spend their time instead of attending an outdated morally dubious organization that keeps asking for more and more money.
I remember leaving the Catholic Church at the age of 16. It was way before the sexual abuse and other scandals came out, but I just hated the way the church treated women.
It took another 15 years before I realized (or admitted) that I was an atheist.
Every one of my siblings (born between 1952 and 62) left the RCC by the age of 20. We each call ourselves different things now (atheist, "theological Switzerland", Zen Buddhist, etc), but they all add up to non-theist. Ditto my nieces and nephew,though a couple of them went to Catholic schools. And, yes, my generation's deconversions happened long before the sexual abuse scandals. Our old diocese, Oakland, California, declared bankruptcy last May, and its founding bishop, Floyd Begin was named as an abuser in Dec 2022. All of the two generations were well out by then. Fuck the RCC and the horse they rode in on.
My siblings are still churchgoers, my brother because he likes theology (he self-taught ancient Greek to translate the Bible), my sister because she likes her "church family" and the good works her church does. But in my line there are only atheists, right down to the grandkids. A couple are into Buddhist philosophy, but most ignore religion entirely.
That's fascinating! My siblings and I basically noped out of the religion by age 11 or 12. I was more academically inclined so took a minor in college in Religious Studies (academic study of religions) and a couple of relevant languages to go with it. It still fascinates me how people get, umm, sucked into religious belief. The thing that Christianity uses about the "4 to 14" window? They know damned well that if they had to wait til kids began thinking for themselves to push their mythology, nobody would accept the nonsense. (See above. My siblings and I were all forced to formally comply til we Got The Hell Out of the family, but stopped believing by 6th grade mostly.)
Hmmm. At least in my generation, we didn't get much critical thinking, at home or in catechism. Nor, I think, in catholic schools. It might be different now. As far as losing the customer base, yes. Look at the stats cited in this post. 6.5 de-conversions from catholicism for every in-conversion. Also, I remember reading a while ago that ten percent of the US population is catholic in name only ("cultural catholics"--and I've run into a shit-ton of them!) but never go to church, donate, send their kids to catholic schools, agree with the RCC on anything much, etc. In other words, absent populations of immigrants from traditionally catholic countries (the Philippines, Latin America, eg), the number of people claiming catholicism would be something like half of what they have. Also, if you were *ever* baptised catholic, the RCC claims you as one. It's virtually impossible to get taken off the rolls. Three of my siblings and I tried--our letters requesting removal were sent the same week, even--and none of us ever got removed. You apparently have to file suit against the Vatican or something, and who can afford that?
Je ne sais pas si tu as déjà lu cet article, alors juste au cas où. Modalités et conséquences juridiques sont les parties les plus intéressantes mais j'ignore à quel point, la seconde peut s'appliquer au Québec.
https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%A9baptisation
Huh. True. (Though my ability to read French sucks and I had to translate the debaptism article on La Wiki into English.) The Oakland diocese probably just tossed our letters in the circular file.
Sorry, you use French with me, so I assumed you had no problems reading it. My bad, I won't forget again 🤗
My decision to completely abandon the RCC was an amazingly liberating experience. It was as if I was allowed to 'come up for air' !
Sorry I'm late, gang ... slept in ... [rubs half a sand dune from his eyes!]
Religion in general and Christianity in particular are anachronisms, buried in the past and mostly incapable of dragging themselves into the ever-changing present. They carry with them the biases and bigotries of millennia ago, along with an insistence on patriarchy and "leadership" based on authority, rather than on actual capability. Religion has managed to maintain its position at least in part by keeping its congregants indoctrinated, ill-informed, and SCARED. Scared of what? OTHERS, and especially the LGBTQ+ community.
It's taken a while, but despite their efforts, a great number of us have managed to wake up (does that make us "WOKE?!? 😁) and recognize the foolishness and failure that religion is and have gotten ourselves shut of it, whether to shrug irrational belief off and become a "none" or declare openly and defiantly, "I am an ATHEIST." More of us either are or know someone in the LGBTQ+ community, and funny thing: we discovered that they aren't that different (if different at all) from us, and that they're not the horrors that preachers and ministers and imams would have us believe they are. Somewhere along that line, we decided, "It does not compute," and we left religion and its irrationality behind.
And good riddance.
The religious contend they have a fine institution. Who wants to live in an institution?
That's a HARD PASS for me, thankuverymuch.
I so want to kill you to steal your bed right now.
Ummm ... my wife might have something to say about that! 😁
I will give her my collection of hand knitted scarves and shawls 😁
So, folks are waking up to the heartlessness of religion. At least, the heartlessness of religious leadership.
It is heartening to see that the complete improbability of it all is the leading cause of religious desertion, though. Of course religious folks will continue to claim that we are all just trying to get away with sinning or their favorite excuse, you were hurt by “no true Scotsman” bad people in the church and the religion is still sound. Anything to hide their discomfort from anyone not believing the nonsense.
Or to hide the fact that it is actually THEM who aren’t the True Scotsmen.
What will they do? What the conservatives are doing now. Trying to seize power and create a taliban style state in America.
Which will not make their god any more real.
Atheism predates all religion. It survived the Dark Ages and continues to flourish. Christians might kill the unbelievers but they cannot kill the idea.
We are all born atheists — no belief in any gods at all when you're coming out of the womb. Then the brainwashing sets in.
That’s why they’re so desperate to push into schools.
Gotta get that indoctrination and brainwashing in while they’re too young to make their own decisions.
Exactly... The Christian Taliban!
Y’all-ka-ye-da!
I always find it amusing when I hear non-religious people claiming to have 'found' god. They never explain where he's been all this time. They never offer evidence of his existence to back up their claim.
My take is that it simply sounds like they were at a low point in their life and were found by a sanctimonious scammer who exploited them and their troubles.
Spoilers: he was in the same place all those missing socks end up after they've been eaten by the dryer.
They join the sock puppet circus.....or get an internet burner account.
There is an urban fantasy writer who played with this concept. One of her heroine has to pick up a lost sock if she wants a shortcut to her destination (Vancouver, Canada to San Francisco or Los Angeles in mere minutes).
https://www.gocomics.com/speedbump/2024/03/27
And here I thought (dryer) sheets repelled static cling.
Every time I meet someone who tells me they found god I have to stop myself from asking, "So what was ruining your life? Drugs? Booze? Sex?"
32% 𝑠𝑎𝑖𝑑 𝑖𝑡 𝑤𝑎𝑠 𝑏𝑎𝑑 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑖𝑟 𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑎𝑙 ℎ𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑡ℎ.
The religious right will deny that religious trauma is real. Here is direct evidence that it is.
Is it good for a young woman's mental health for her religion to tell her that she is only good for pumping out babies for an authoritarian man? No.
Is it good for a teenager's mental health for their religion to tell them their natural sexual curiosity is evil and need to be suppressed? No.
Is it good for a trans child's mental health to be ejected from the only home they know because their religion says that's the proper way to treat who they are? Oh fuck no.
Is religion bad for people's mental health? The answer is an unequivocal yes.
I seem to be getting a lot of mileage out of the following lately:
"We keep on being told that religion, whatever its imperfections, at least instills morality. On every side, there is conclusive evidence that the contrary is the case and that faith causes people to be more mean, more selfish, and perhaps above all, more stupid."
-- Christopher Hitchens, from his book "Letters to a Young Contrarian." Published October 17th, 2001
Call me an optimist, but perhaps humanity if finally, finally starting to shake off its need for childiish fantasies and the empty promises of religion.
The optimist believes we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true.
In my case, I'm half-optimist and half-realist. 🙂
I joined tghe Half-Fast racing team years go.
Religion indeed makes people stupid!
"20% said their churches had become too political, and I predict that number will only get larger in the years to come."
As I've said many times, I liked religion a lot more before it became a political party, and I liked the Republicans a lot more before they became a religion. And now that the Republicans seem to be promoting "Christians for the anti-Christ for president", this seems to be even more of the case.
Religions of Peace™ are dwindling because of hate. And their hierarchies don't seem to grok. I guess God needs a new church...
Christianity describes itself as the "Religion of Love." The history books say otherwise.
But Christians throughout history have loved so many things! Like, um... bloodshed, conquest, torture, ignorance, power, riches...
You forgot rape and looting.
Subjugation. Don't forget subjugation.
Subjugation. Submission. Not my will but thine be done. This is the kind of peace that religions offer us, and it is the reason why we must reject them utterly.
As the Brits say: Bang on target.
Amongst the things that christians have loved.......
I'll come in again.
To the "nones" who have ditched the labels and institutions, yet cling to the belief in the Christian god:
I strongly encourage you to read the bible from Genesis to Revelation. That by itself will demolish any lingering notions you may have toward "the spirit in the sky" and start you on the path to reason, away from any and all superstition.
From what I've read, and snickered about, some religious leaders have determined that doubling down on the hate and misogyny is somehow the way to restore their numbers. What's not to snicker at when they decide the way to go is to do more of what is driving people away?
Self awareness is not their strong suit.
It's probably not as dumb as that. What they are doing is maybe more analogous to a company focusing on the demographic that actually regularly buys the product, rather than catering to the demographic that says they like the product, but then never puts any money out for it.
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the clinical definition of insanity.
I hate that phrase.
Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is called *practice*, and it is perfectly reasonable because *it works.*
https://thedevilspanties.com/archives/16061
Mouseover text:
I forget about the two year delay and I didn't realize comic Liz is 4 when yesterday Liz said this as a six year old. 4 year olds know how to write, right?
I always wonder if people who use that phrase have ever chopped down a tree.
Or learned to ride a bike.
Or, you know, had sex.
No offense.
As encouraging as these figures are, the other thing to consider is the way the churches are being distilled down to the true believers to whom any kind of compromise is unthinkable. These people have convinced themselves their religion entitles them to a say in other people's personal choices. There is a growing tendency in the Christian-nationalism movement to do so by force if they ever get the chance. Reasonable people just can't allow that crowd to win because, although it is ultimately self-defeating, a determined minority can cause no end of problems for the majority.
Of course they are.
We have:
Rabbis who sell body parts.
Protestant pastors who run real estate developments disguised as churches.
Televangelists who grift for money for private jets, air-conditioned doghouses, and to pay off hookers and angry church secretaries they raped/bopped.
Catholic priests who molested children.
Mormon deacons who worship and glorify gaining wealth (and sometimes polygamy).
Muslim imams who tell their flock to go commit suicide bombings, and then watch the action from an air-conditioned and heavily guarded compound in Pakistan.
and
Buddhist monks who say "everything is as it should be."
Right.
Rabbis giving male babies herpes via the Metzitzah B'Peh circumcision ritual that involves sucking the blood from their penises.
Yeah, that's another bizarre touch...the anti-Semites are obsessed with that one.
I just saw on CNN that anti-Semitic propaganda is reaching new highs in low. One of the three leading groups in pushing that garbage out is the "Goyim Defense League."
I bet the only place they fight battles is on the Internet. If they actually had to fight people on the street, they'd hide behind the army of cops at the demonstration.
As they do.
Creationists supporting oil lobbyists as well as extorting money from state governments, overworking and underpaying their employees, and begging courts for the right to discriminate against gays, trans, Jews, and others without accountability (And yes, I'm talking about Dumb Idiot Ken Ham here!).
Yeah, but they only read the Bible when they're at a dinner and, as Mickey Mantle said while drunk at an event, "Here's the f****** preacher" comes up to give the invocation.
Other than that, they just read corporate reports and business magazines.
I understand why the reason for people to leave the church is their treatment of LGBTQ people. I know that the bigotry was out there in most religions when I was growing up but I didn't really see it that much. It was the "hate the sin, love the sinner" mentality I guess. Today the religious hate of LGBTQ people has become a political issue. Mostly because the Republicans have fully embraced religious hate as a way to shore up their numbers since just catering to the ultra-wealthy is not a winning strategy. As such, the Republican party has done what it always did - scare people with the oppressed-group-du-jour. This predictably has created some backlash, just has hating on POC did 60 years ago.
The vast majority of US *liberals* would not have approved of gay marriage up to about 2010. Before that, outside of gay communities themselves the 'mainstream liberal' view from 70s-80s onward was, at best, civil unions for all. Bill Clinton authored don't ask don't tell...and that was as far as he was willing to politically fight. Not even civil unions. Hilary, when running against Obama, was civil unions for all.
So bigotry for sure, and not just limited to conservative evangelicals. But I'd draw a distinction between that and the hate the right-wing is showing today. Most of the folks I'm talking about happily interacted with gay people on an equal and socially accepted footing - they just didn't think through the implications of what it meant for society to deny gays the institutions straight people had. This is in contrast to the folks who *refuse to serve* gay couples even today, or the preachers who call for them to be put to death. That sort of sentiment, AFAIK, has not occurred in any great amount on the left since before the roaring (19)20s. The GOP and conservatives have predominantly owned gay hate for the past century.
There's a reason why "altar boy jokes of yore" have the names of Father O'Reilly, Father Gahagan, etc. in them. Not because they're made up, but because there's truth in the joke. Sexual abuse in the Catholic religion was the worst-kept secret for eons
As for my personal tale, I was not raised in a church (I always tell people that I was raised amongst Catholics and then when I moved to the South, I am now amongst Baptists). My parents were agnostic; my father being an "excommunicated Catholic" for marrying my non-Catholic mother in a Presbyterian church (he's yet to receive the letter almost 55 years later). Both my parents were dropped off at church and picked up later with their parents never attending and they vowed to never do that to me. I did attend church with neighbors or friends if they went, but it was never ingrained in me. I thought it was dumb and didn't understand - even as a pre-adolescent - how people could attend a church and be "non-churchlike". I saw the hypocrisy early on. I didn't not get suckered in.
When I was younger I told people I was "agnostic" or "humanitarian" (when in actuality I was pretty sure I was atheist but didn't want to deal with the scorn of not at least being "spiritual", especially in the South), but the past 5 years I have embraced my atheism and now call myself an, "anti-christofascist humanitarian".
Churches have been driving away members for some time now via a combination of factors, including a number of issues that crop up in the Bible itself and are addressed, but most churches don't seem to adhere to. I suspect that the hypocrisy is starting to really wear, and well, that's never been a good look for anyone.
The truth is, people don't need their local church as an excuse to meet socially anymore, and most folks are tired of the Sunday Morning Fashion Show. For most people life is hard enough, and churches haven't been doing much of anything to make it easier, so it's only to be expected that folks aren't interested in staying with it anymore. With all the other options around, folks have started looking for more sensible cost/benefit ratio ways to spend their time instead of attending an outdated morally dubious organization that keeps asking for more and more money.
Sleeping in works for me.