I believe ,and this is just my opinion, that it is by and large evangelicalism where easy believism resides. If they had not left Traditional Christianity there would not be the decline, evangelicalism just does not give people what they need
I don't know if I can agree with the last sentence, because I don't think everyone in the same religion is necessarily after the same thing in their religious practice (so "what they need" might be different between Orthodox, Catholics, Evangelicals, etc., even if they would -- and really
should -- all answer something about salvation in Christ being the ultimate goal of the Christian life), but other than that, this is spot on.
Traditional Christianity gives a person a lot more
to do, for lack of a better way to put it. Some people might interpret this as "works salvation", but that's not really what I mean. It's more like how my mother (who was a devoted but mostly omni-denominational Protestant for all of her life; one of those hippies who got 'high on Jesus' in the 1960s as a
real rebellion, since her own mother and father were never religious
) had her Bible with her until the day she died, and when I took possession of it and got to look at it myself, I noticed that it was full of underlining, highlighting, notes in the margins, etc. -- all these scribbles I'd
never put in a Bible. I don't find it appropriate to write in a Bible at all. But I thought about it, in the process of becoming Orthodox 10-11 years ago, and I realized something: All of these notes and highlights and everything were her means of interacting with the text and the stories and the faith more generally. Since everything she encountered was drawn from the Bible text itself, there were some notes that were just "???" or "Aha!", or a circled word with no explanation -- like she was puzzling things out for herself as best as she could, but didn't have the moderating/guiding influence of a traditional Christian Church that would situate the Bible text and messages in a context that would
make sense relative to what else the people in the Church were doing (things like why we pray, why we fast, why we chant instead of talking, why we don't have extemporaneous sermons on whatever the priest feels like talking about, etc)
. Because there wasn't really that same relationship of the Bible to the Church and to
liturgical worship as there is in the Orthodox and Catholic and what remains of the more traditional Protestant churches.
So without making any claims about what life is like in churches that I don't belong to, I can say from just this one example that it makes sense to me why people would leave faith in situations like this (though my mother herself never did, she also died before the internet was everywhere and people like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins were household names, so I have no way of knowing how she would've reacted to the world as it is today). There's not a lot keeping them there to begin with, and when the Bible and the Bible alone is
everything, it is much easier to poke holes in their beliefs by making them doubt that the Bible is what they think it is (whether that's a matter of inerrancy, or presuming that we have autographs of the Gospels, or presuming that the Bible is a scientific manual, or whatever the specific belief is).
