Who Will Be Among The Millions This Year?

Dr. Jason Long

I believe that the decision to denounce the faith and leave the comfortable confines of Christianity has a strong correlation with a combination of two factors: high levels of intelligence and low levels of exposure. From my anecdotal observations, I’ve noticed that individuals who leave Christianity are either fairly intelligent or received relatively less conditioning from their parents.

Once I made this discovery, I noticed that those who had both of the aforementioned qualities left at an exceedingly early age, while those who had only one quality left the religion in their late teens or early adulthood. Christians probably won’t deny that a strong influence persuades a person to remain active in church. Likewise, it’s only logical to conclude that a lack of the same influence increases the chances a person will leave the faith.

The intelligence element to my hypothesis, on the other hand, is surely insulting and certainly difficult for Christians to swallow. Even so, I strongly feel that a line exists where a certain level of intelligence and a certain level of influence reach equilibrium.

As I just mentioned, an intelligent person with a low level of Christian influence has the best chance of leaving the religion at a young age, whereas an unintelligent person with a high level of influence is almost certain to remain within the church for life. The interesting scenario created with this hypothesis is that an intelligent person with a high level of influence would have two competitive forces at work.

One would seemingly free the individual from bunk religious thought while the other would presumably fight to keep the individual within the faith. Since there are more people who stay within the church than those who leave, we can reasonably assume that the influence is a stronger factor than the intelligence.

Similarly, an unintelligent person with a low level of influence has no competitive internal forces at work. Consequently, this individual wouldn’t develop groundbreaking theories on the existence of God or have external influences pressuring them to believe one way or another.