Trading one religion for another

While it is uplifting to read of more and more teenagers "seeing the light" and leaving Christianity or whatever religion held their mind captive, what I’m seeing as a side-effect of this is certainly not uplifting. And the best way I can summarize this side-effect is basically to call it "trading one god for another".

What do I mean?

I notice that a lot of those who became atheists while in high school or college also become seemingly ultra-liberal, and seemingly overnight. It seems they must be associating political and economic concepts that have no ties to religion with religion, and so start to take on entirely opposite political and economic points of view without any consideration of the evidence behind those points of view. A lot of atheists say they became atheists after discovering there is almost no evidence supporting the religion to which they previously belonged, but then start taking on economic and political points of view for which there is also little evidence in support.

In short, atheist teens and college students appear to be trading Christianity for statism.

Now many Christians will readily proffer the idea of leftist professors and "godless" teachers as the reason for this. In my experience, going to college that arguably had a more liberal-leaning teaching staff, I don’t find this to be the case. Not even my (Ph.D.’d) economics professor made any kind of attempt to indoctrinate us toward either Austrian economics or Keynesian economics, or whatever other economics model might exist. He just presented what was known and let us process it.

Now I won’t say such indoctrination never happens, but I doubt highly it’s as large a problem as the conservative right in this country attempts to model it.

Instead I believe it to be as I’ve already stated: a false association of certain political and economic views to Christianity. Christian conservatism and economic conservatism are not the same thing, yet too many atheists appear to think they are. And as such they begin to think that political points of view they once held are as wrong as religion without really looking into it, or they glance over some materials that in summary say their once-held political views are wrong and adopt the advocated point of view.

They leave Christianity which puts on the appearance of advocating for limited, responsible government, and turn to atheism and statism, the latter of which openly advocates for big, irresponsible government.

Thankfully not all Christians-turned-atheist are like this, so I hope it’s just a case of the ones who are just being a very vocal minority.