A Phrygian named Quintus, for example, “abandoned his salvation” when presented with the choice of renouncing Christ or being killed by wild beasts in the arena. Some early Christians apostatized when faced with pressure from the state. Of course, back when Christianity was young, oppositional, and persecuted, the church kept its eye on the problem of apostasy. It is hard to imagine a Unitarian-Universalist apostate. To leave some religious groups is to apostatize, while to leave other groups-notably mainline Christian groups-is simply to float away. In the United States, with our promiscuous spiritual questing, many of us are never exclusively in one religion enough to one day find ourselves out of it. To make a true apostate you need a religious community that has, among other things, obvious insiders and outsiders. Haggis is now America’s leading apostate, and it is not surprising that this role came to a Scientologist.
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