In July I wrote an article (“Losing Faith in Religious Higher Education“) for the Chronicle of Higher Education on leaving Christianity and my resulting choice to leave my position as a professor in a seminary. It was well-received, which was a relief.

I have many ideas for follow-ups to that piece, each dealing with different aspects of leaving faith, from the personal and observational to the intellectual reasons that brought me there. The first of these is now out and since it isn’t about higher education I pitched it to The Guardian’s opinion section.

In “When we give up a faith, we grieve for the community we leave behind,” I look at the types of grief individuals go through when departing a faith. For many, departure is nothing but a pleasure, but for others no longer believing in God can feel like a loss of a loved one at first and can result in prolonged turmoil over lost family or friends. I explore a couple aspects of grieving I experienced early one and looked at how others might experience that loss as well.

I was on vacation when it came out yesterday, so I wasn’t able to track every response online, but I did get some nice feedback (and the usual comments that every writer comes to expect after an article on religion). In a space limit of 800 words there is only so much that can be said, but I hope this helps to connect with those who might be looking to know they aren’t the only one’s that felt this way. Here’s a taste of the article:

You’ve likely heard the numbers by now. Approximately 23% of Americans are religiously unaffiliated (atheist, agnostic and “nothing in particular”). This demographic is expected to double by 2050….

….Transformation on this scale is a type of national existential crisis and, in this case, it’s entangled with the nation’s historical Puritan ideal of being God’s “shining city on a hill.”

I understand the desire to chart and track the evolution of religion in America. But I’d argue that this shift doesn’t just need to be documented – we also need to listen to the non-religious to understand their experiences. As someone who recently took a turn for the secular, I suspect that we’ll discover that not only is this new population as diverse as the individuals in it, many of us are grieving parts of what we lost along with our faith…. Read the full article at The Guardian.