Teresa MacBain on her transition from minister to atheist at Reason in the Rock 2012. Daniel Everett. How I Gave Up Religion. Deconversion part 1: Jesus & Young People. Deconversion, Belief, and the Power of Silence. The author's hope in making this documentary is that he can be, for one person, the person he never had in his life through the years of losing everything he believed in.
It is OK to not be a Christian. This is a tragic love story of unusual nature, but it happens - and not enough people are talking about it. Not enough people can. It took him five years to tell his best friend that he was not a Christian anymore. Sometimes it takes a while to say what you mean. This is his struggle with incompatible truth and crippling, terrifying cognitive dissonance that silently steals his identity as he's ripped apart from the fabric of relationships and unspoken beliefs that we're all woven into.
This struggle builds to a bridge, a climax and he's forced to either modify what he believes or lose his faith. Watch the full documentary now (playlist - ) Why I Am No Longer a Christian. Unbelieving preachers get help to 'come out' as open atheists. By Dan Merica, CNN (CNN) – Jerry DeWitt entered the ministry when he was 17, launching a 25-year career as a Pentecostal preacher.
He traveled all around his home state of Louisiana, preaching and ministering wherever he could. All these years later, DeWitt, 42, is still on the road, and now takes his message all over the United States. But the nature of that message, along with his audience, has changed dramatically. DeWitt is now an avowed atheist, and his audiences are made up of religious “nones,” the growing number of Americans who are atheist, agnostic, humanist or just plain disinterested in identifying with a religion.
During his speeches, he talks about the process of leaving his preacher job. “You can either be honest that you don’t believe ... or you can pretend that you do,” he said. CNN’s Belief Blog: The faith angles behind the biggest stories But a relatively new effort goes a step further than his own group by focusing on helping clergy in particular. The Accidental Atheist: How I Got Here and How You Can Help (Part 1 of 2) Life Without God : An Interview with Tim Prowse. Tim Prowse was a United Methodist pastor for almost 20 years, serving churches in Missouri and Indiana.
Tim earned a B.A. from East Texas Baptist University, a Master of Divinity (M.Div) from Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri, and a Doctor of Ministry (D.Min) from Chicago Theological Seminary. Acknowledging his unbelief, Tim left his faith and career in 2011. He currently lives in Indiana. He was kind enough to discuss his experience of leaving the ministry with me by email. Can you describe the process by which you lost your belief in the teachings of your Church? An interesting thing happened while I was studying at East Texas Baptist University: I was told not to read Rudolf Bultmann.
Ironically, it was seminary that inaugurated my leap of unfaith. It sounds like you lost your faith in the process of becoming a minister—or did you go back and forth for some years? After I read your book, The End of Faith, I could no longer suppress my unbelief. "Unorthodox:" A Woman's Journey from Repression to Freedom.