Anne Hathaway Tells Why She Left the Catholic Church

During a recent interview with the excellent Terry Gross of NPR's "Fresh Air" Ms. Hathaway talked about why she could not longer be a member of the Catholic Church:

GROSS: I should mention, this is maybe a good place to talk about it, that your brother is gay, and he got married in Canada. And I read that your family left the Catholic Church when your brother came out because the Catholic Church is so, like, anti-homosexual.

So was it a hard decision or just like a no-brainer to leave the church when your brother came out?

HATHAWAY: Well, it wasn’t really like we had a family discussion about it. We didn’t sit around the dinner table and say, okay, this is the decisive action we’re going to take now. It was more something we realized we’d all done as individuals, and then it became something that we’d done as a family.

And gosh, was it difficult? You know, when it’s family and someone is excluding your family, and someone is not accepting of your family, it does become a bit of a no-brainer, doesn’t it?

GROSS: So was it hard for you to leave the church? Was the church important to you before?

HATHAWAY: Faith is important to me. You know, being raised with one faith and having to go out into the unknown and try to cobble together another, that was hard. But I wasn’t really leaving something because I realized I couldn’t have faith in this religion that would exclude anyone, particularly my brother, for the way he’s born and for loving someone. I mean, how do you exclude someone for love? That seems to be the antithesis of what religion’s about.

And by the way, you know, I [don't] mean to Catholic Church-bash. I do understand that, for a lot of people, the religion provides a lot of peace and direction. But I don’t know… if they could be accepting of women and of gays… I think that the religion gets a lot of things right.

But for me, I couldn’t lose myself in it. I couldn’t look to it for guidance because it’s like I said, I don’t believe in this aspect.

While I will disagree with Ms. Hathaway about her view that "religion gets a lot of things right" I will praise her for doing what too few have the honesty and courage to do: to refuse to be part of an organization that treats their own family members as second-class human beings. It just goes to show that if you are part of an organization that does so, then you really are little more than a coward.

Young Christians Leaving the Church at Fast Rate Ever

Quote:

Those marking "no religion," called the "Nones," made up the only group to have grown in every state, from the secular Northeast to the conservative Bible Belt. The Nones were most numerous among the young: a whopping 22 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds claimed no religion, up from 11 percent in 1990. The study also found that 73 percent of Nones came from religious homes; 66 percent were described by the study as "de-converts."

Other survey results have been grimmer. At the May 2009 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, top political scientists Robert Putnam and David Campbell presented research from their book American Grace, released last month. They reported that "young Americans are dropping out of religion at an alarming rate of five to six times the historic rate (30 to 40 percent have no religion today, versus 5 to 10 percent a generation ago)."

...approximately 70 percent of American youth drop out of church between the age of 18 and 22. The Barna Group estimates that 80 percent of those reared in the church will be "disengaged" by the time they are 29.

more: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/november/27.40.html