Characteristics, predictors and outcomes of religious deconversion: A cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis

This study investigates characteristics, predictors and outcomes of religious deconversion on a wide range of variables. The analytic sample for this study comprises n = 4451 respondents, including a longitudinal sample of n = 502, from two decades of mixed-method research on faith development, religious change, and deconversion in Germany and the US. The analytic strategy for the longitudinal sample adopts an exposure- and outcome-wide longitudinal design to examine cross-time associations of self-reported religious deconversion (‘deconverted from the religion growing up’ vs. ‘stayed with the religion growing up’) with a range of less studied predictors and outcomes, assessed on average eight years before and eight years after the report of deconversion. Measures include, but are not limited to religious schemata, religious centrality, fundamentalism, pluralism, God representation, mystical experiences, psychological well-being, personality traits, generativity, need for cognition, and intellectual humility. Results include the strong predicting effect of low scores on both truth of texts and teachings and self-rating as religious, and generally document lower scores on all dimensions of religiosity before, during and following deconversion; indications of a religious residue effect appear to be overturned by secularization trajectories toward religious irrelevance. Unique in our data, results indicate high openness to experience, low extraversion and low positive relations with others as predictors, while high need for cognition and low extraversion emerged as outcomes of deconversion. Finally, this study allowed the reexamination and general confirmation of the criteria for deconversion that were proposed in 2004 by Streib and Keller.