As Spector (for various and certainly not all laudable reasons) leaves the Republican party, I read this in the LA Times:

In most cases, former Catholics who are now unaffiliated said they were dissatisfied with the church’s teachings on abortion, homosexuality, birth control or treatment of women.

Change can happen from within people!  You don’t have to leave.  Your leaving just makes the crowd that much more difficult for the rest of us.

This sounds right to me. I’ve often though that it’d be easier for me not to believe in God than not to be Catholic, and I’m not sure a lot of Protestants can say that about their tradition.  But I know a ton of Jews who can say that about Judaism.

Most who leave Judaism become unaffiliated, rather than converting to another religion; Many continue to identify as Jewish in an ethnic or cultural sense, concluded the study’s author, Tom W. Smith, director of the General Social Survey at the National Opinion Research Center of the University of Chicago.

“Jewish losses are disproportionately to no religion,” he said.

With 76 percent retaining their faith, Jews are more “religiously stable” than Catholics (73 percent); and while eight in ten Protestants remain Protestant, specific denominations retain a much lower percentage of members — as low as 16 percent in one case.