Why Leaving Your Faith is a Leap of Faith

Once personal identities and entire social systems are built on top of a story, it becomes unthinkable to doubt it. 

 ~Yuval Noah Harari

We all remember the iconic moment when Indiana Jones faces the chasm on his search for the Holy Grail. He approaches a deep canyon with no apparent way across, but somehow he knows that if he takes a step of faith, a way will be provided. Once he steps, he discovers that a bridge was there all along, hidden via optical illusion.

Ignoring the fact that he could've saved himself some heartburn by simply feeling around with his hands first, this scene is an important allegory for many things in our lives. Sometimes we can't see how things will work out, so we have to take a leap of faith.

Cowardice or Courage

Many people who leave their religion are accused of cowardice, of taking the easy road. And this may be true for some who fall by the wayside despite still believing. But for me and many others I know--those who left because they no longer believed--this couldn't be further from the truth. Leaving your religion takes courage. It is one of the scariest and hardest things a person can do. 

For those who remain believers, this is difficult to see, because believing in and following a religion is also hard. You have to follow a strict code of conduct, attend meetings regularly, sacrifice many hours, and often suspend doubt and exercise faith (often against reason and evidence) in order to believe. So to them, leaving all of this seems like the easy way. But it is not. 

It's hard to live a high-demand religion, but it's even harder to leave it.

Stepping into the Dark

Why is it so hard? Later on I'll discuss the psychological and social pressures, but to put it simply, leaving your religion is a terrifying leap into the dark. You face the prospect of losing everything you built your life upon, including your core beliefs, nearly all your relationships, and possibly even your  very identity. You don't know what you will find instead. What will your family and friends think of you? Will your spouse leave you? Will you lose your place in heaven? How will you make important life decisions? Will you be able to find meaning and purpose? Will you become a drug addict? Will you be a good person?

I heard a great illustration from (ironically) a BYU devotional talk by Scott Miller entitled "Humble Uncertainty": 

The dread of that first step into the darkness and its inscrutable world can be quite distressing, as if one is about to stomp on prickly thistles with one’s bare feet. The resolve—or desperation—required to take that step explains why it is often easier to stay in a well-lit room rather than enter the darkness...

To leave your religion is to enter into a thick fog of darkness, never knowing where, how, or if, you'll ever emerge. All your life you've been warned against going down this road. Satan will deceive you--you can't even trust your own judgment. You'll be miserable. Your life will be empty and meaningless, and you'll never again know true happiness.

Impossible Castles

So why step into the dark at all? Why leave the comfort of a well-lit room for the uncertainty of the darkness? Before I get into this, we need to talk about how our minds construct beliefs in the first place, and how we process new information.

When we first hear a piece of information on a new topic, our minds make judgments and create a space for that idea to dwell. When we encounter new information on the same topic, instead of evaluating it independently, we try to fit it into the space we've already created for that topic in our minds.

Over time these spaces grow into huge castles that constitute our belief system. When we learn and evaluate any new information, our minds are more concerned with inner consistency than independent evaluation. If something fits into our castle neatly, we usually accept it without much convincing. It feels good. It feels right. It induces cognitive ease. But if something doesn't fit into our framework, alarm bells go off. We are immediately skeptical.

This is called cognitive dissonance. It can be very unpleasant; it feels like an attack on our precious fortress. And it has to be resolved, but doing so can be like an actual battle where we defend our beliefs against "evil" attacks from the outside. 

As a side note, this process can be exacerbated if we believe that these good feelings and yucky feelings are signs from the Holy Ghost, assuring us of truth or warning us against falsehoods. They are not. These feelings of cognitive ease and cognitive dissonance are well-documented in research and they happen in every belief system.

For the most part, we try to dodge cognitive dissonance altogether, by avoiding or discounting information that conflicts with our beliefs, and seeking out information that confirms them. This is called confirmation bias. We all do it, and there's no way around it. It's a natural result of how we process the world around us, and the more important a belief is to us, the stronger our confirmation bias will be.

However, in spite of our best efforts we will inevitably encounter contradictory information that we can't discredit. Sometimes we can compartmentalize this new information--pretend it doesn't conflict by locking it up it in a separate castle of belief. Sometimes we simply put the foreign invaders on a shelf for a time and pretend they don't exist. 

Ultimately though, we will have to do some remodeling. This is usually not a big deal. It may involve simply reframing a prior belief, or sometimes discarding unimportant ones. It's painful and difficult, but it's a process of growth.

However, if we try to incorporate too many contradictory beliefs, our castle can soon become a contorted maze, like the abstract drawings of houses with impossible stairways and passages. Those who hold these intricate contradictory belief systems are not stupid; in fact, it takes a lot of skill and intelligence to construct and maintain such impossible castles. 

Personal and Social Cataclysm

However, once you become aware of exactly what you're doing, it becomes more and more difficult to continue building this impossible house, while maintaining your integrity. And yet, the alternative is also unthinkable, possibly resulting in the complete collapse of your entire moral and social framework, upon which you've built your identity and community, and sacrificed so much of your time and energy. Yuval Noah Harari put it perfectly:

[T]heir personal identity is built on the story. People are taught to believe in the story from early childhood. They hear it from their parents, their teachers, their neighbors, and the general culture, long before they develop the intellectual and emotional independence necessary to question and verify such stories. By the time their intellect matures they are so heavily invested in the story that they are far more likely to use their intellect to rationalize it than to doubt it.

Once personal identities and entire social systems are built on top of a story, it becomes unthinkable to doubt it. Not because of the evidence supporting it, but because its collapse will trigger a personal and social cataclysm.

This threat of catastrophe is what keeps so many people attached to their beliefs. It's what makes it so hard to change your mind. Everything, all your relationships, almost every major life decision up to this point, and ultimately your eternal salvation, hinges upon your belief system being true. You've already sacrificed so much, including 2 years in the prime of your life (for those who served LDS missions), thousands of dollars in tithing, hours of service, and hundreds of other sacrifices. These sacrifices couldn't have been in vain. The church has to be true. So when one is faced with the possibility that their faith may be misplaced, it takes a lot of courage to venture into the dark and face this new reality. It is often easier to stay with your familiar, albeit distorted house of cards.

Redirecting Faith

The critical point in my faith journey came when I was willing to ask the difficult question, "What if the LDS Church isn't true?" And even more so when I decided I didn't need it to be true; that I was willing to accept it not being true. I decided to put my faith in evidence and sound reasoning rather than in the belief itself.

This shift in my thinking didn't mean I rejected my beliefs outright. It meant that I shifted my focus from defending my beliefs at all costs, to discovering the truth through an unbiased evaluation of the evidence. It meant that I was willing to tear down my castle and reconstruct it piece by piece, this time evaluating all the evidence available without any motivation to arrive at a particular conclusion, trusting that if my old belief system were in fact true, it would withstand this exercise and come out triumphant. However, part of me knew this wouldn't happen, else why the need to dismantle it in the first place? But it was just enough comfort to allow me to proceed.

My Journey

This post is the introduction to a new blog all about my faith journey. In future posts I'll talk about the discoveries I've made along the way, new insights I've uncovered, and overall thoughts about life. I'll talk about the psychology of belief and decision making, the history of religion, scientific skepticism, epistemology, moral frameworks, tribalism, logical fallacies, and sometimes even politics. I hope you will join me.

Conclusion

Although leaving the Church may seem to some like the easy road, it was one of the hardest things I've ever done. Abandoning my faith ironically involved the biggest leap of faith of my life. It meant being willing to allow my entire world to collapse around me, and trusting that I could build something better in its place. It meant trusting that things would be okay, while taking a terrifying leap into the dark.

Additional Resources

I highly recommend this TED Talk by Julia Galef, where she compares our thought process to that of a soldier defending his belief versus a scout exploring his surroundings. She also has an excellent book called The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't, which I highly recommend.

I would also recommend Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics for his research in the psychology of decision making, and specifically how humans make irrational but predictable mistakes in economic decisions. His research in psychology paved the way for an entire new field called Behavioral Economics. This book talks about how our minds process and store new information, and it also has many insights about judgment and decision making. It's sure to show up in future posts.