Most Evangelicals-turned-atheists deconvert in their twenties and thirties. Ministers, in particular, tend to deconvert when they are younger. Rare is the pastor who waits until he is in his fifties or sixties before he abandons the ministry and Christianity. Part of the reason for this is because older ministers have economic incentives to keep believing, or at least to give the pretense of believing. I know of several pastors who no longer believe, yet they are still doing through the motions of leading churches, preaching sermons, and ministering to the needs of parishioners. Their reasons for doing so are economic. Quitting the ministry would cause catastrophic economic and marital damage, so these unbelieving pastors continue to play the game.
It’s difficult to know, but I suspect that the Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman’s experience is typical. Raised in a fundamentalist family, Ehrman went to Wheaton, and then to Princeton Theological Seminary, and exposure to actual scholarship instead of the disorganized pastiche of maxims and feel-good tales that is the Sunday fare in most churches, caused him to realize that he’d been peddled a load of insane claptrap.
The Southern Baptists now strongly urge their seminarians toward young marriages and swift childbirth, and I’ve wondered often through the years if the reason is because those things help to lock young men into the system. After all, the scholarship is dispositive: the Christian narrative is false — and that is a settled fact. You will never hear an academic defense of it outside the sectarian academy, where the professors have a contractual obligation to uphold it.
By the time a kid gets through seminary he probably has realized there are problems with the story told him by Pastor Bubba, but he probably isn’t ready to throw it away, either. If he has a wife who grew-up dreaming of being married to a preacher — and young women are groomed for that, just as young men are groomed for a life in the clergy — it is profoundly difficult to walk away. And, of course, it is vastly more difficult when there are children who have to be fed. Game, set, match — and the poor kid never even knew what a rotten, cynical game he’d been steered into.