One of the hottest religious topics nowadays is “deconversion,” a word so new that it has yet to enter the official lexicon of most official English Dictionaries. The APA (American Psychological Association) describes it as “loss of one’s faith in a religion, as in a Catholic of many years who becomes an atheist or agnostic.” Jews might consider the concept alien, since we hardly have a religious “faith” to lose.
We became a “faith,” after all, only under duress — in order to justify our citizenship in the post-Napoleonic nation states. We couldn’t be both Americans and Jews by nationality, and the western world didn’t recognize our traditional category of peoplehood, so we agreed to call ourselves a “religion,” which is to say, a “faith.”
But we all know that Judaism is more than that. Christians who deny their faith become unchurched, lapsed, “deconverted.” Jews who leave the synagogue are not called “unsynagogued.” Even the most marginal Jews don’t use the word “lapsed.” But what about the new term, “deconverted”? Can Jews deconvert?
They can, and here is why.
Unlike Christianity, it has little to do with belief. Indeed, you have to work very hard to be read out of Judaism on grounds of belief alone. Most obviously you can adopt Jesus as your messiah; Jews for Jesus seems hopelessly oxymoronic to us. But we are not consistent. Lots of Jews are Buddhists too, Jubus: and we have no problem with that, because Buddhism too is more than just a religion, whereas Christianity, in theory, is not.
To be sure, in practice, Christianity too is a mixture of things: ethnic origins, for example (Italian, Irish and Polish Catholics are all Catholics even though they differ from one another). But whatever kind of Catholic you are, if you denounce the pope and renounce Catholic dogma and practice, you have deconverted. Jews who do not believe in God and ignore Jewish practice may still say they are Jewish and be counted as such. Hitler would have killed them; Israel is full of them.
So Jewish deconversion is about something other than faith.
The equivalent of “faith” for us is identification as a member of the Jewish People, which we measure in two ways: how much we consider world Jewry to be “our people”; and whether we view Jewish history as “our story.” Think of the “evil child” at the seder, whose “sin” is asking “What is the point of this ritual to you” not “to me.”
To all intents and purposes, both of these measures (people and story) have long been condensed into two pivotal symbolic events: the Sho’ah and Zionism. The former was the nightmare of our people almost destroyed. The latter was the dream of our people reborn and reunited with its past in the land of Abraham and Sarah; David and Solomon, Isaiah and Jeremiah.
Deconversion for Jews, then, is the process of turning one’s back on Jews across the globe, but especially in Israel (where almost half the world’s Jews now live); and opting out of Jewish history, especially where classical Zionism is concerned. So yes, Jews can “deconvert” and for the first time in memory, large numbers of them are doing so.
I mean, of course, young Jews with no memory of Israel before Netanyahu as prime minister: the growing cohort of Jews for whom Zionism is neither the Herzlian haven against anti-Semitism, nor the Ahad Ha’amian renaissance of Jewish culture — but rather, another right-wing state increasingly dominated by the West Bank settler movement and by ultra-Orthodox Haredim. The Gaza war is a tragedy on all counts: above all, the brutal Hamas attack itself, but also the military response (whether necessary or deplorable or both) which threatens to make Israel a pariah state, and which is catalyzing the next Jewish generation to renounce and to denounce – not the pope and Catholic teaching, but the Jewish state – both its people and its story.
It follows that we can learn a lot from studies of Christian deconversion.
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1. Just giving our current generational alienation the neutral name of “deconversion” helps us think creatively about it.
2. Deconversion is best approached less as a sin than as a strategy, by which the deconverters respond to an overwhelming sense that they just cannot go on as they are without threatening their deepest moral convictions. They seek authenticity: a match between what their innermost selves affirm as true and the kind of world they can uphold and call their own. At stake for them is not just what they say but who they are.
3. Deconversion typically unfolds in stages. The Gaza war is not so much the beginning of it all as it is the most recent and most threatening next step of many. When young people first question their traditional familial values – as they have already, on many matters — they begin to feel isolated, as if being among their parents’ generation is like living among strangers. They gravitate to others like themselves, lest they suffer the loneliness of being a cognitive minority of one — even at the cost of turning a blind eye to ways in which those ideological “others” may actually be very different. Hence the phenomenon of Jews who protest the war alongside some otherwise questionable allies, rather than revert to the loneliness of ideological solitude.
4. When people begin to deconvert, the absolute worst opposing strategy is to double down in denunciation: to “just say no.” Those who flirt with deconversion would really prefer remaining within the fold, if only the fold turns out to have some place for them. More than they choose freely to leave, they feel forced out, because the establishment is beyond even discussing matters with them, let alone conceding that what they feel so strongly about may have some moral merit.
5. As with all conflicts, simply debating the actual point of conflict is unlikely to change positions. A better policy is organizing conversations about what lies behind the conflict, in this case, discussions like: What about Judaism matters to you? What can we all agree upon as the redeeming factors about Israel? What kind of Israel would we like to see? Where might we agree that it has gone wrong? What might a better Jewish community here at home look like?
Such conversations are unlikely to occur while the war goes on and Jews on both sides get increasingly locked into their own respective positions. But until calmer times arrive, we can at least avoid mistaking would-be deconversionists as “the enemy.” Just resisting the vitriol will pay huge dividends later.
[i] I am indebted to the following sources on deconversion.
Barbour, John. Versions of Deconversion: Autobiography and the Loss of Faith (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994).
Bielo, James S. Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity and the Desire for Authenticity (New York and London: New York University Press, 2011).
Harding, Susan. “Converted By the Holy Spirit: the Rhetoric of Fundamental Baptist Conversion,” in American Ethnologist (14:1) February 1987:167-181.
Hempton, David. Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
Marriott, John. The Anatomy of Deconversion: Keys to a Lifelong faith in a Culture Abandoning Christianity (Abilene: Abilene Christian University Press, 2020).
Stromberg, Peter G. Language and Self-Transformation: A Study of the Christian Conversion Narrative(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, Ph.D. 