Deconversion narratives and their triggers

Academic studies of deconversion narratives (Streib, et al.) cluster the triggers into roughly five categories: intellectual / historical (encounter with biblical criticism, science faith conflicts, OT moral problems), moral / ethical (sexuality, gender, institutional behaviour), existential (problem of evil, prayers unanswered), social / community (hypocrisy, abuse, cult dynamics), and slow erosion (burnout, accumulating dissonances).

The site is most directly equipped to address category 1. The Bart Ehrman type case (Moody Bible Institute student encounters textual criticism, finds the strict inerrancy he was taught is unsupportable) is handled by the historical, manuscript, and exegetical sections of the site, which argue for a Christianity that takes biblical criticism seriously while still grounding the resurrection.

The site cannot fix category 4 (bad churches) and does not try to. The site's promise is narrower: if your trigger was intellectual, the actual mainstream scholarship supports more of the Christian claim than popular skepticism implies.

Ehrman himself remains the most cited skeptical scholar in the knowledge base, because his concessions carry maximum evidential weight.

Reading

• Heinz Streib et al., Deconversion: Qualitative and Quantitative Results from Cross Cultural Research, 2009.
• Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 2005; How Jesus Became God, 2014.