Opinion | Why These Six Americans Moved Away from Organized Religion

Ultimately, that change in perspective led him to take Buddhist vows in 2017. “I still reflexively say ‘Alhamdulillah’ and ‘Allahu akbar’ and ‘Mashallah’ when good things happen,” he said, but he now considers himself a Zen Buddhist and agnostic. “I don’t care about religious labels. I just want to live an ethical life, a life of service, of helping others,” Jackson said.

Patty Gray, 63, who lives in California, also had a mercurial religious journey. She was baptized in a Methodist church in Omaha as a baby, but even as a kid, didn’t find that tradition inspiring — “I was bored to tears sitting in the pews,” she said. Her family moved around a lot, from Nebraska to Connecticut to California to Tennessee. She went to college in Michigan in the late 1970s and, her freshman year, “The resident adviser in my dormitory was this very tall, handsome guy that I fell madly in love with. And it turned out that he was active in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship,” the campus ministry. “He sort of took me under his wing and then I ended up getting born again,” Gray said, and over the next couple of years, she shifted from one religious group to another.

Later, she ended up getting involved in the charismatic Christian movement, a kind of Christianity that focuses on the encounter with the Holy Spirit rather than on specific liturgical practices. Gray said at first she was practicing a “feral” kind of Christianity that wasn’t really attached to a specific institution. After that, she got involved with what she describes as a “very extreme, top-down, hierarchical, controlling,” charismatic, “speaking-in-tongues and increasingly politicized Christian” organization. She said the organization controlled how she dressed, behaved and dated, and its ideas were reinforced through repetition and peer pressure. “You couldn’t even look lustfully at a man without talking to your overseer” about whether that relationship might be approved by God. She describes herself as, at one point, “brainwashed.”

When I asked how she ended up moving away from that community, she said, “I sort of discovered sex.”

After that, she was basically done with organized religion, though she has remained friends with many people from her observant days, and has studied religion as an anthropologist. She doesn’t describe herself, at this point, as agnostic or atheist, and she is interested in spirituality. “I’m sitting here right now looking at all the flowers blooming in my garden, and when I go out there and have spent some time with my hands in the dirt, I get a wave of well-being and a feeling of connectedness to the universe,” she said. “That might be the original impetus that I had as a teenager coming toward religion, you know?” Gray mused. And she doesn’t want to lose that feeling.