Perhaps it’s different in the US, but here in the UK most of the ex-Christian atheists I know are ex-evangelicals.
Caveat 1: It should be said that what’s called evangelicalism in the UK is generally saner than what’s called evangelicalism in the US.
Caveat 2: I’m one of them, so there’s an obvious sampling bias.
I think maybe there are two different processes going on: gradual drift, where religious people become less seriously religious (and maybe eventually nonreligious) over the course of their lives, and more sudden conversion, where they explicitly think things through and decide to change their position. (“More sudden” can still mean “over a few years”.) The first mostly produces atheists out of casually religious people (because they’re less firmly committed to a particular position and can drift more easily) and out of liberally religious people (because the distance to atheism is less). The second mostly produces atheists out of seriously religious people (because they find it more important that their beliefs actually be true, and take more trouble to think about them) and out of conservatively religious people (because their positions are more drastically and obviously wrong). It may also be that there’s correlation between being seriously religious and being conservatively religious, e.g. because there’s little point in being not-seriously fundamentalist.
Perhaps it’s different in the US, but here in the UK most of the ex-Christian atheists I know are ex-evangelicals.
Caveat 1: It should be said that what’s called evangelicalism in the UK is generally saner than what’s called evangelicalism in the US.
Caveat 2: I’m one of them, so there’s an obvious sampling bias.
I think maybe there are two different processes going on: gradual drift, where religious people become less seriously religious (and maybe eventually nonreligious) over the course of their lives, and more sudden conversion, where they explicitly think things through and decide to change their position. (“More sudden” can still mean “over a few years”.) The first mostly produces atheists out of casually religious people (because they’re less firmly committed to a particular position and can drift more easily) and out of liberally religious people (because the distance to atheism is less). The second mostly produces atheists out of seriously religious people (because they find it more important that their beliefs actually be true, and take more trouble to think about them) and out of conservatively religious people (because their positions are more drastically and obviously wrong). It may also be that there’s correlation between being seriously religious and being conservatively religious, e.g. because there’s little point in being not-seriously fundamentalist.