The Nones: Damaged

In my previous article on the topic of the Nones, we discussed in brief how the Nones is too general of a category for all disaffiliated members of the Church. Because people have left the faith for a plethora of different reasons, evangelists must use different categories and therefore different methods of building relationship when dealing with these groups of people.

Enter: the damaged. Saint Mary’s Press in Going, Going, Gone calls them the “injured,” and David Kinnaman, President of the Barna group and author of You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving the Church… And Rethinking Faith calls them prodigals. For our purposes, we will call them the damaged because again, alliteration helps with memorization.

The damaged have determined that their faith is either inconsequential or entirely deplorable. Most often, these young adults can point to a specific event in their life which was the juncture by which they broke rank from their Christian counterparts. This is the reason for calling them the damaged, harkening back to the breaking point at which their life was splintered, their previous faith-filled life discontinuous with their new faithless life.

Saint Mary’s Press defines their category of the Injured this way;

One dynamic that can lead to disaffiliation are negative experiences associated with faith and religious practice, both familial and ecclesial. The interviewees shared stories of divorce, long-term illness, death of family members, frequent moving, and other family issues that caused disruptions in their lives that affected their faith,

Kinnaman, for his part denotes two different types of damaged disaffiliates with his dual category of the prodigals - the head-driven and the heart-driven prodigals. When discussing Kinnaman’s prodigals, don’t think of the prodigal son in the Gospel of Luke. These individuals have not forsaken the faith of their families out of pride. Instead, these young people either consider Christianity intellectually or morally untenable.

The existence of moral evil, especially something quite proximate to the person experiencing it, posits a question. An apparent contradiction between what the individual has been told about God - that He is all good and all powerful - and the deprivation of a good experienced in the life of the individual.

The evangelist cannot provide a mere apology for God’s passive will allowing evil to bring about a greater good, especially for those more heart-driven in their disaffiliation. The truth of the matter is not of concern for those damaged for there is an irreconcilable cognitive dissonance between the truth of the doctrine and the lived experience of the individual.

Coupled with the problem of evil is the experience where the perpetrator of the evil in question is especially involved in or otherwise is a representative of the ecclesial community. In the eyes of the young person, this individual becomes the representative of the Church - even to the level of a sacrament - a stand-in representative for God himself.

Regardless of their orientation as intellectual or emotionally focused in their reasoning for disaffiliation, damaged individuals share several characteristics in common. They feel varying levels of resentment towards Christianity and Christian stereotypes, though they may have softer feelings towards Christians in their lives who they consider not to have overtly wronged them.

They feel like they have broken out of certain constraints in that they see their previous life and the moral demands that Christianity makes as previously holding them back, and once Christianity no longer holds sway over them, they feel more free. Whether these young people are justified in their self-understanding is not in question here, the fact of the matter is that this is their experience. These damaged individuals have a sharply disjointed understanding of their lives, frustrated with their past selves, with their Christian community, and at times, resentful.

The next piece in this series will discuss in greater depth the Dissenters, those disaffiliates who have left the faith for more intellectual reasons, similar to the head-driven damaged individuals. The key difference being the damaged experience of moral failure leading to the intellectual problem of evil, whereas the dissenters tend more towards questions of morality in their disagreements with Church teaching, leading them to disaffiliate.

Works Cited

Kinnaman, David. You Lost Me: Why Young Christians are Leaving the Church and Rethinking Faith. Baker Publishing Group. Grand Rapids, Michigan. 2011.

Saint Mary’s Press & the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. Going, Going, Gone: The Dynamics of Disaffiliation in Young Catholics. Saint Mary’s Press. Winona, Minnesota. 2017.