A Jude 3 Project study guide, built for personal reflection or a small group, about 45 minutes, on why people, including people raised in the church, walk away from faith for atheism, and how to respond without fear or defensiveness.
The Big Question
Why do people, including people raised in the church, walk away from faith for atheism, and how do we respond well? This guide follows apologist Alycia Wood, who spends much of her work engaging skeptics directly, through the nine reasons she hears most. The throughline is uncomfortable but clarifying: most people who leave never actually thought their faith through in the first place, and the alternative they land in does not answer the hard questions any better. It just answers them differently. This is the mirror image of a different study in this series, What Would Make an Atheist Become a Christian, which traces the opposite direction, someone moving toward faith rather than away from it. Reading both side by side shows that the same hard questions, about meaning, evil, and evidence, sit at the center of both journeys.
Catechesis: Know, Believe, Worship
This is a doctrine and discernment study, so the goal is not just sympathy for people who leave, it is building your own foundation so you do not face the same questions for the first time under pressure. Know what you believe about where morality comes from, about the problem of evil, about the historical claims underneath the resurrection. Believe it because you have tested it, not because it was handed to you unexamined. Worship out of a settled confidence rather than a fragile one that cracks the first time someone asks why.
Why Doesn't Removing God Actually Remove the Hard Questions?
Sit with this directly, because it is the spine of Wood's whole approach. Evil, suffering, and moral confusion do not belong to Christianity. They belong to being alive. Leaving the faith does not make the questions disappear. It only changes who or what you are asking to answer them, and Wood's case is that the atheist's answer is colder, not clearer. A universe that does not care about your pain has simply traded a hard question for a hopeless one.
This is worth slowing down on, because it cuts against a common assumption on both sides of the conversation. Believers sometimes act as though leaving the faith should make a person's life fall apart, and skeptics sometimes act as though leaving should make the hard questions vanish. Neither is quite right. Plenty of atheists build coherent, even admirable, lives without God. What Wood is pointing at is narrower: the actual content of the hardest questions, why does suffering happen, what makes something truly wrong, what gives a human being worth, does not go away just because the vocabulary around it changes. The atheist still has to answer them. The answer is just built without a Creator in the picture, and Wood's claim is that the answer gets thinner, not stronger, as a result.
Why Does Wood Spend So Much Time on the Church's Own Failures Instead of Just Defending Doctrine?
It would be easier, in one sense, for an apologist to skip past slavery, fatherlessness, and hypocrisy and go straight to the philosophical arguments. Wood does not take that shortcut, and the study should not either. Owning the church's real failures is not a concession that weakens the case for Christianity. It is part of making an honest case at all. A defense of the faith that will not look squarely at where Christians have failed badly is not really a defense of the faith. It is a defense of an institution's reputation, which is a smaller and less honest project.
Scripture to Sit With
1 John 2:16. The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. Wood names this plainly as one real reason people leave: not an intellectual problem but the pull of the world, which has always existed and does not require the faith to be softened in response.
John 20:24-29. Jesus gives Thomas evidence, then calls him to believe. The model for New Testament faith is trust built on evidence, not belief without it.
Genesis 1:27. Human worth is grounded in being made in the image of the Creator. This is Wood's answer to claims that Christianity is outdated. The questions it answers about human value have not gone anywhere.
Quotes Worth Discussing
Science can't determine morality. (Alycia Wood)
There's no answer to the problem of pain or suffering or evil that should ever make you feel okay with it. (Alycia Wood)
The value of creation is tied up in its creator. (Alycia Wood)
On atheism: it offers a life without God, but it seems to be a life none of us truly want. (Alycia Wood)
It fascinates me that Jesus was harder on religious people than he was with the sinners. (Rasool Berry)
If you don't know the answer, say you don't know the answer. Don't try to fake it till you make it. (Rasool Berry)
Discussion Questions
- Which of the nine reasons Wood names have you heard most often, or felt yourself at some point?
- Wood says many believers never thought their faith through. Where is that true for you right now, if you are honest?
- How does naming the actual limits of science change a conversation with a skeptical friend or family member?
- Read John 20:24-29. How does Jesus treat Thomas's doubt, and what does that say about the kind of faith the New Testament actually asks for?
- Wood argues atheism does not answer evil or morality any better than Christianity does. Do you agree? Where would you push back on her?
- Rasool Berry says it is better to admit you do not know an answer than to fake one. When have you been tempted to fake an answer instead of saying you needed to think about it?
- Wood argues that most of the nine reasons are objections to how Christians behaved or taught the faith, not arguments against God's existence itself. Does separating those two things change how you think about someone who has left?
A Practice for the Week: Test One Belief
Pick the one reason among Wood's nine that unsettles you most, the one you have privately wondered about but never said out loud. Sit with it honestly this week instead of avoiding it. Write down what you actually believe about it and why. If you cannot finish that sentence yet, that is useful information, not a failure, and it tells you exactly where to start studying.
A Second Practice: Own One Failure Honestly
Alongside testing your own belief, take Wood's example and practice owning a real failure of the church without flinching and without using it to excuse walking away from the actual claims of Christianity. Name one specific way Christians, historically or in your own life, have failed to live the gospel. Sit with it honestly, the way Wood sits with slavery, rather than rushing to defend the institution. Then ask the harder question she asks: does that failure actually disprove the claim, or does it indict the people who claimed it without living it?
Go Deeper
Source: Engaging Atheism, Alycia Wood's session from the Jude 3 Project 2022 Pastors and Leaders Conference. Related Jude 3 episodes: Are We Trying to Become God? The AI Crisis with Abdu Murray, and How Can the Church Become a Place People Don't Want to Leave with Rasool Berry, which covers the same hypocrisy objection from the side of the person hearing it.
A Closing Reflection
Ask God for the courage to think through the one question that unsettles you most, rather than thinking around it. A faith that has been tested and held is sturdier than one that has simply never been asked a hard question yet. And if someone in your life has already left over one of these nine reasons, resist the urge to win the argument retroactively in your head. Ask instead whether you actually know, with confidence, why you still believe what you believe. That is the foundation Wood is building toward, and it is sturdier ground to stand on than simply being right that someone else left for the wrong reason.