According to BYU researchers, the truth concerning religious disaffiliation depends on a long-term perspective.

Vern Bengtson (1941–2019), one of the world’s foremost experts on teaching religion to youngsters, abandoned his faith at an earlier age.

However, this famous scholar was “surprised by joy” when he entered an Easter service in his 60s, as C.S. Lewis famously put it. It is obvious that a measurement of Bengtson’s life at 30, 40, or 50 would have completely missed the whole picture.

Similar to this, our understanding of many significant issues in our current-focused culture is based on limited, short-term metrics, such as three- to six-week pharmacological trials, customer satisfaction surveys, real-time event feedback, and snapshot polling results.

It’s easy to become enmeshed in oversimplified narratives regarding numerous significant issues that ultimately prove to be untrue if we don’t extend our perspective to consider longer-term trends throughout time.

Justin Dyer and colleagues at Brigham Young University argue that those “simple narratives” about religious disaffiliation “need to be tempered or discarded by real data figuring out what’s actually going on from a variety of angles.”

Disaffiliation and reconversion over time are depicted in more detail in the latest Wheatley Institute paper, “The Tides of Religion: Leaving, Staying, and Returning to Faith,” which was published last week.

The report was written by a group of academics from Brigham Young University who analyzed the available data from a variety of perspectives and areas of expertise.

“How many are leaving, who is leaving, which faiths are most impacted, the personal and social consequences of disaffiliation, how many people return to faith” (particularly in the U.S. context) are among the questions the report specifically addresses in light of the literature that is currently available regarding religious disaffiliation.