Stories of Leaving Religion

Doug Matheson shares the background to his social anthropology graduate research and how he turned that research into a non-academic book. Matheson grew up a missionary kid in India, attending only Seventh-day Adventist schools. He spent more than a decade trying to reconcile evidence with his beliefs. When he was 37, he “encountered the straw that broke the camel’s back” and then quietly left the faith. At age 62, he decided to do a second stint of graduate work, this time in social anthropology, to study the religion-exiting process.