Why people actually leave the Catholic Church

(And what you can do about it)

If you ask 100 people why people leave the Catholic Church, you will get 101 different answers.

Typically, people answer along the lines of their pet issue.

People who are really into liturgy will say irreverent liturgy is why people leave. People who are affected by the sex abuse scandal will say that it’s because of the sex abuse scandal. Protestants will say it’s because of the Bible. Atheists will say it’s because of hypocrisy.

But the Pew Research Center did a study and found that for the most part, it is none of those things. All of those things play a factor, but it is not the number one issue. Not even close.

Almost 3 out of 4 former Catholics who left Christianity entirely say a reason they left the church is because they gradually drifted away. For Catholic → Protestant its 1 in 2.

We have to focus on the “gradual drift”

The “gradually drifting away” statistic is the only one that matters, in my opinion.

If you give people a multiple choice survey, they’ll say, “Yeah I left because of the liturgy…but I also gradually drifted away.” or “It was because of the sex abuse scandal…but I also kind of just gradually drifted away.” Those reasons are mutually exclusive. Either it was gradual or it was a conscious choice.

For the most part, people will retroactively ascribe a reason for doing something, especially if they did something gradually.

I had a friend from elementary school who used to say she left Catholicism because every time she went to church, the pastor gave a homily on why people weren’t giving money. Which is funny because I went to church every weekend. That didn’t happen. People tend to invent reasons to justify things they did on accident as something they did on purpose.

Most people who left the Church did so gradually and without thinking.

And this tracks with what we know about sin. People typically don’t choose out of nowhere to commit a mortal sin. They gradually drift into it, and then all of a sudden, boom, they commit a mortal sin.

So we can’t fix the “eight people leave for every one convert” problem until we know why people are actually leaving. And having this statistic in mind is important when we have discussions about why people leave Catholicism. The answer is drift.

So how do we stop the drift?