Growing up in the Adventist church, the two main reasons you’d hear about people, especially those under 30, leaving the church was for them to be “sowing their wild oats” or that “they studied their way out of the church.”

Some of my cousins were said to be sowing their wild oats, meaning they were just living life. That was those who left with everyone expecting them to eventually settle down, get married, and come back. In the generation before mine that was pretty common, but for mine there’s the added benefit of very visible and accessible atheism that they can find, even if it just starts as a post-hoc justification of their lives. Of course, when it comes down to it there is no bad reason to be an atheist.

When I dropped out of the seminary, the awkward conversation with my mom included, “What will I tell people, that you studied your way out of the church?” Since everybody in the local church was so proud of the future pastor their son was, they would ask about me from time to time. I knew this wouldn’t be easy for them, so I was fine with her using the old cliche. Besides, even though I didn’t like it at the time, it was pretty accurate.

The thing is, what does it tell you about an idea or way of life if you can study your way out of it? You never hear about people studying their way out of science, skepticism, humanism, or atheism, just the church, oh, and ignorance.

The kind of mindset behind such a view as people being able to study their way out the church, is one of fear of education. It’s a way of thinking that views professional education (including the ministerial variety) as a necessary evil and something that is not to be trusted.

When it comes down to it, saying that someone studied their way out of the church is admitting that they moved past their ignorance and moved on with life and it’s a weird admission of ones own comforting ignorance.