By Keelin Fisher

Rick O’Kelley was sprawled across a wooden church pew when the world was supposed to end.

He was 8 or 9 years old, still small enough to stretch out along the wooden pew, his head resting against the hard varnish. Outside the 81 Freewill Baptist Church in Rudy, Arkansas, everything was business as usual. It was the early 1960s. Other residents were on their way home from work, and children were outside playing until the street lights came on, signaling it was time to go inside for dinner. But inside the house of worship, the faithful intently waited.

His mother had rushed him and his brothers there after hearing a radio broadcast warning that Jesus Christ would return that very day. Their minister had also dreamed that a comet was a sign of the Second Coming, or Jesus’ return. So, members at 81 Freewill Baptist Church—which still operates today—drove to the sanctuary and sat along with others and waited.

O’Kelley, who typically fell asleep by 9 p.m., drifted off.

He was woken up close to midnight, only to find out it was time to go home. Nothing had happened. The earth was still spinning. No end of the world. No Second Coming.

Another eight years or so passed. At 16, just weeks away from his seventeenth birthday, O’Kelley arrived home to find his parents enraged.

He had befriended a Catholic girl who had just moved to town and did not yet know anyone. It was a solely platonic relationship, but that did not matter to his parents. They were concerned that she was Catholic, reflecting the deep doctrinal and theological differences between Free Will Baptists and other denominations.

His father’s belt came off before any questions were asked. Soon after, the teenager found himself cornered in his room as the belt swung toward him. “Where is God to protect me?” he remembers thinking.

His mother stood nearby to do the talking, speaking for his father, saying he could not be friends with the girl because she was Catholic.

“Where is God to protect me?” he thought again.

O’Kelley grabbed the belt with both hands, yanked it away and ran out of the house. “Where was God to protect me?” he asked once more.

He ran to a nearby creek where the Boy Scouts often met, found a bench to spend the night on in the cold air and still made it to school the next day.

“I’d been raised in church to be a friendly guy, to try to be nice to all people — and now they’re telling me I can’t be friends with this girl,” said O’Kelley, now a 73-year-old retired homicide investigator and former chief investigator for the Washington County Sheriff’s Office.

O’Kelley’s experience provides insight into the American religious life experienced by some of today’s growing number of non-believers, where people raised in deeply rooted Christian traditions sometimes question their faith later in life, struggle with it or eventually leave—or move to churches that better match their beliefs—after years of internal doubt and pressure.

In Rudy, O’Kelley was raised in the Free Will Baptist Church. But the name is ironic, he said, because he had no free will, though he acknowledges the title actually refers to the belief that sin exists because individuals have the freedom to choose it. His great-grandfather had been a minister in the denomination. His grandfather was a deacon. His father would eventually become one, too.

That cycle stopped at O’Kelley.

For most of his childhood, he questioned the existence of a higher power, reflecting a broader national shift. According to a 2026 Gallup analysis, 42% of men ages 18 to 29 said religion was “very important” to them between 2024 and 2025, up from 28% between 2022 and 2023. Young men now surpass young women on the importance they place on religion, reversing a long-standing gender gap. But many Americans, like O’Kelley, are walking away from the Church.

Professor Lynda Coon, an associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas with 40 years of experience as a historian who focuses on religion and cultural history, said the decline reflects something she has been watching build for years. Rather than abandoning spirituality altogether, she said, many young people are simply no longer willing to conform to one institutional structure.

She points to the rise of Christian nationalism as another driving force pushing people away. The movement, which asserts that the U.S. was founded by and for Christians, has been building for decades.

“People think this happened overnight, but it’s been building since the 1970s,” she said, referencing movements tied to dominionism, or the belief that God intends Christians to gain influence within civil institutions so that biblical principles can guide and govern the nation. She also added that the gradual blurring of church and state is a key part of that story.

“We’re sort of the heirs to that situation right now,” she said.

For O’Kelley, the pressure to accept Christ and receive salvation, or the Christian belief that a person is forgiven of sin and granted eternal life through faith in Jesus, began at age 12. That is also the age at which Free Will Baptists believe Jesus was in the temple speaking with the elders, O’Kelley said. Every Sunday during altar calls, the older women of the congregation—the great-aunts, the grandmothers, always the elders—would reinforce that expectation.

The women would move through the pews during the invitation and lay hands on the 12 and 13-year-olds and push them toward the front. O’Kelley’s friends gave in one by one. “Just go up there and get it over with and they’ll get off your back,” his buddies told him. He watched them get baptized and then go right back to practicing the same behaviors as before. But O’Kelley never went up to the altar because he said it was dishonest.

People in the church were not permitted to ask questions. “I saw all kinds of cases growing up where I thought, ‘If this stuff is real, why is this happening?’” he said. “But we weren’t allowed to talk about it. Every time you’d ask a question, it was blasphemy.”

The moment the world was supposed to end, along with the beating at 16, were pivotal points that confirmed his skepticism of the church. He never believed, he said. When his parents passed away in 2006 and 2009, he stopped pretending entirely. Today, when people ask him if he is a Christian, he says no—although he used to say yes to avoid being questioned. He does not practice any other religion, nor does he label himself as atheist or agnostic. To him, any religion is just “organized crime that is protected by our government.” Religion is made up, he said, because he has yet to see evidence.

What he does see, and what has been a driving force of his denial, are things that make him ask where that higher power was to protect him and others.

His first homicide victim was a 22-year-old Catholic woman who was murdered by a 16-year-old boy for the $12 and change in her purse. His last homicide case was a 35-year-old Protestant mother who was killed by her 15-year-old daughter, who attended church with her.

“Where was God to protect these women?” he asked.

In 2008, he experienced a brain aneurysm while working as a computer programmer. He made it to his car and called 911. At that point, he was at peace with the possibility that he might die, as he did not believe in any kind of afterlife and felt certain he would return to the same state he was in before he was born. What did concern him was the thought of a young Fayetteville detective searching his pockets the same way he had done in the deaths he investigated.

Today, he believes the existence of a higher power is something churches cannot answer. For some, that inconsistency leads them to step away.

Danielle Post, a 48-year-old photographer and artist, described a similar experience of unraveling in a different church.

She grew up in a fundamentalist non-denominational church in Oklahoma whose rules she found hypocritical and hard to make sense of, even as a young kid. She was not allowed to watch “The Smurfs,” as she was told it was satanic. But her mother took her to “Smurfs on Ice.” She also could not have a unicorn toy but was taken to see “Legend,” the 1985 Ridley Scott film in which Tim Curry plays the Devil, because it portrayed him as the villain. She could not, however, watch “E.T.” nor could she listen to Boy George. But the Beatles were fine because they were from her mother’s era.

Her mother converted from Catholicism and left the denomination because she questioned the Bible and was told it was not up to her to read it, because the men would explain it. She then landed in the fundamentalist world during the Satanic Panic, or a moral panic in North America, driven by fears that widespread satanic cults were ritually abusing children. Post believes that fear was intensified in her family by her father, a closeted gay man, and her mother’s resulting guilt. Every time something surfaced about her father, her mother would blame herself, saying it was her fault for not being a good wife, pushing her to the extremes of her faith.

At age 5, Post witnessed what was described as an exorcism. Her first one. She watched the people around her, unsure of how she was expected to respond when the pastor approached. After about 30 seconds of chanting, she began imitating the sounds. She then fell to the ground as others did during what was described as being “slain in the Spirit.” She then pulled up a blanket and slept through the rest of the service, but her mother later referred to that day as a miracle and talked about it for years.

Post stopped attending church when she was 15. As an adult, she tried to reconnect with her faith during a difficult period in her life. Her infant son had been physically abused by her ex-husband, and the baby had black eyes and other injuries that a 5-month-old could not have inflicted on himself. But later, people in the church told her the abuse stemmed from demons that only appeared because her ex-husband had tattoos and piercings. Her mother called her crying and distraught, saying that the tattoo on Post’s body had also played a role.

“That’s not how the child got four black eyes,” Post thought.

She left again, this time permanently. “I felt free,” she said. “A lot of the things within church—it’s very fear-based. Even though they try to make it seem like you have nothing to fear, it’s always, ‘If you don’t do right, you’re going to Hell.’ And I no longer had that fear.”

Post now raises three children without religion and said her daughter goes out of her way to stand up for people who she believes are being treated unjustly. All her kids stand up for what they consider just, she said.

Despite this, someone told her a few years ago that she must not have morals because she was not a Christian. “I don’t know about you, but I love other people for who they are,” she responded. “I respect other people, unless they give me a reason not to. I try to live my life in kindness and acceptance of others.”

Her mother, she added, has struggled with her family’s path away from faith, once questioning how she ended up with two “unbelieving” children, with Post describing herself as “punk rock” and her brother, who also left the church, as a “staunch atheist.”

That kind of generational break is increasingly common in American religious life, and scholars have pointed to a broader pattern often described as “the great dechurching.”

A 2024 NPR discussion of the phenomenon reveals that about 40 million Americans have left churches and other religious institutions in the past 25 years, with religious sexual abuse scandals among the factors contributing to some departures. While the Catholic Church has been the center of that scrutiny, a 2025 Pew Research study reports that 62% of U.S. Catholics say clergy sex abuse remains an ongoing problem, although 68% believe it is equally as common among other religious leaders. However, many of the reasons cited in the NPR discussion are more mundane, reflecting broader cultural and social shifts in how people engage with Christianity today, such as changes in work, family life and mobility.

Religiosity is increasing among at least one demographic: young, white conservative men.

Grahm Burks, a 23-year-old University of Arkansas alum, said his level of engagement with faith is roughly seven out of ten. He goes to church most Sundays and considers himself a traditional, conservative Christian, although he said he knows why people often avoid the label.

He grew up Methodist. In his northern Louisiana high school, a pastor was reassigned after someone said something about a gay person and feelings were hurt, he said. When he got to Fayetteville, he started playing guitar at U of A Wesley College Ministry on campus. Then, leadership changed again, and he decided he was done rebuilding from scratch.

“It’s a bunch of petty squabbles,” he said. “I’m tired of dealing with it.” He now goes to St. Joseph’s with a Catholic friend, though he is not Catholic himself. Regardless, he, like many others, longs for a stable environment to practice his faith.

Over time, Burks thinks Christianity has become a right-leaning identity, while rejecting it became a left-leaning one. He said President Donald Trump is a significant factor in Christian nationalism in the U.S., but not necessarily a cause, adding that he thinks Trump is “a symptom of the whole culture war problem.”

Coon, the professor and expert on the topic, said she sees younger generations reshaping religion through what she calls “DIY religion,” or do-it-yourself spirituality. She said her Generation Z students increasingly draw from multiple traditions and approaches rather than conforming to institutional structures. “They’re not conforming to a particular institutional structure of religion,” she said.

She noted that moments of church-state blending are not new historically but tend to reappear in different forms. When that happens, she said, religious communities often debate the proper relationship between faith and political authority, especially in democratic systems like the United States.

What college student Burks described as a “new counterculture,” built around what he calls being “racist, homophobic, conservative” and “hypernationalistic,” has taken hold particularly among young white men, he said, with figures like far-right commentator and live streamer Nick Fuentes rising rapidly in influence. On the other side, people are looking at the association and deciding they want no part in it, but he does not think the people leaving are necessarily losing their faith.

“Because people don’t want to associate with these hypernationalists,” he said, “I think they’re just leaving the church.”

He does not think there is anything morally wrong with the concept of progressive Christianity, although he said he does not think people should be “so free and wild about [their] theology and about [Christian] principles.”

“I’m not quite on the side of those principles,” he said of progressive Christianity, “but I think they have the right idea that we need to try and be a lot more accepting and not fall to the side of that extreme hypernational Christian side of the faith.”

Vanessa Ryerse, the 52-year-old co-pastor and co-founder of Vintage Fellowship, a small progressive church in Springdale that meets once a month, was raised in the fundamentalist denomination called the General Association of Regular Baptists, where members were not allowed to associate with Southern Baptists because Southern Baptists were considered too liberal, according to her religion at the time.

Ryerse spent years inside that system by attending a Christian school, Bible college and ministry before shifting her mindset. She specifically recalls a Good Friday service she attended while living in Michigan, where she was asked to leave the service because her infant child was coughing, even though her other two children under age 5 were still seated in the room. That moment was when she decided to leave the denomination entirely, creating her congregation with her husband roughly six months after that incident.

That response is an example of what Coon calls “recalibration” of Christianity, arguing that religious systems often shift rather than collapse. During those periods, new forms of Christianity emerge that respond to political and economic change instead of replacing a belief entirely.

With that, Coon added that history shows recurring movements that call for a return to what she described as Christianity’s “apostolic roots,” emphasizing service, humility and reduced focus on institutional power. She said these cycles often appear when religion becomes closely tied to wealth or political authority, which prompts internal reform movements.

Now she leads her congregation the way she believes Christ intended. About 20 years after the Good Friday service that prompted Ryerse and her husband to leave, she greeted her congregation members at Vintage Fellowship church in Springdale on a recent Sunday, which happened to be Easter.

The door in the Springdale church unlatched into an open floor plan, the room filled with families — men gathered on couches talking, women clustered together in easy conversation. Many members were tatted up with piercings and colored hair. In the kitchen area, there was a turquoise fridge filled with food and drinks for all guests.

“It’s about that time,” one man on the couches said, prompting the group to stand up and move toward the other area, where there were five tables topped with coloring sheets, Play-Doh, and Crayons.

As Ryerse’s husband began the service, 68-year-old Lois Fess sat alone at a table, sketching on a blank sheet of paper with Crayons. Her hair was cropped to about an inch on top, while the rest fell well past her collarbone. She wore a long white dress splashed with purple, green and pink, paired with brown moccasins.

As a child raised in the Southern Baptist church in Colorado, Fess believed she was part of a more progressive congregation because her mother took her to a church that allowed dancing, which was something many Baptists still considered sinful.

When she looked up from her paper, she asked, “Do you like my deconstructed basket?” She had drawn six small blobs scattered throughout the paper, all of different colors. In the corner, she had used the green Crayon to cluster straight scribbles together, the kind of thing someone does with a pen to test if it works. Nearby, a semicircle was layered with crossing lines. On the opposite side, an arc of tight, curly marks took a crescent shape. At the bottom, a tiny and simple outline of a bunny anchored the page.

“It’s an Easter basket and it’s deconstructed,” Fess added. “We were talking deconstruction, so I just deconstructed the basket.”

She paused, then softly sighed.

“Yeah, and the fact that—I actually don’t know that I can explain it now,” she said, as the basket related to deconstruction.

Before the service, Fess had reflected more directly on what the idea of deconstruction meant to her.

“Most people are somehow injured from their previous upbringing in churches, some more than others,” she said. “I would say me less, but I’ve heard about folks just totally isolated from the world just because of how strict their upbringing was.”

Deconstruction in a religious context is the process of reexamining long-held beliefs, which surfaced earlier in Ryerse’s service as she discussed her evolving view of Easter. Her husband dropped a raw egg on the wood floor to suggest that faith is fragile, because it requires care and can easily be lost. Ryerse later led the service and discussed that modern Christianity often frames Easter as a story of power and victory, while its first witnesses experienced something quieter.

Toward the end of the service, Ryerse went up to the small stage, where there was a cluster of grape-flavored Capri Sun and a bowl of Goldfish crackers. She began handing them out, echoing the traditional communion ritual. Ryerse had grown up going to Ms. Julianne’s Sunday school in the church basement, where the woman never once took a break and never missed a week.

She would ask the children, “Who does Jesus love?” and when a child answered “Me,” she gave them a Goldfish. Years later on Easter Sunday, Ryerse would do the same thing but with everyone in the service, including adults.

Her service focused on openness, where she invited people to be comfortable and to engage faith in a less rigid way. She pointed to Jesus’ ministry as rooted in ordinary people and mutual relationship, not status or authority, and pushed back against ideas that faith requires strict self-denial to achieve worthiness.

For Fess and many others, deconstruction was tied to rethinking what she had been taught, and some had chosen to walk away from it completely. Taken together, the shifts in the traditional church have contributed to a steady movement away from it—although not always as outright rejection, but sometimes as disengagement or rethinking.

At the front of the room, the bowl of Goldfish sat where communion might have been.

Some people came forward. Others stayed seated. No one told anyone else to go up just to get the pressure off their backs, and no mother was asked to leave because her child was crying.

“There are a lot of us that are trying to address that,” she said, referring to the exclusion and rigidity that has driven so many people away from the church. “That movement may be hard to find, it might be hard to understand that there are a group of people working to combat that. But it does exist.”

After decades of navigating spaces that she felt had little room for her, she built one open to all. Ryerse said that the arrangement of the church and the focus on individuality and acceptance are a direct reaction to the church she stepped away from.

“People need to know what that feels like,” Ryerse said. “If you come from an environment where you’ve not experienced that before, you need somebody to show you what that looks like. That’s healing.”