William Lobdell has followed four different religions. Now he's an atheist.

Raised Episcopalian, the 48-year-old Orange County, Calif. man switched to a non-denominational parish and then a Presbyterian one.  After going through a year of Catholic conversion classes he eventually realized that he is “a reluctant atheist.”

“I wish I believed,” said the former Los Angeles Times reporter and author of the memoir “Losing My Religion: How I Lost My Faith Reporting on Religion in America – And Found Unexpected Peace.” “I’d like to believe that someone is watching over me and protecting me, but I just don’t believe that.”

He may be an extreme example, but approximately half of Americans change religions at least once in their lives, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. The forum recently released a report, "The U.S. Religious Landscape: Exploring Religion in America," based on surveys of  35,000 people.

Pew found that Catholicism has seen the sharpest decrease in membership among all religions in the U.S.  About 10 percent of all Americans are former Catholics, according to the survey.  The Archdiocese of Chicago declined to interview for this article.

“The church has taken positions that are rather rigid and have refused to bend or even reconsider their positions,” said Robert McClory, a current Catholic, former priest and associate professor emeritus at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. 

While the church takes a staunch anti-abortion stance, American Catholics are almost evenly divided between abortion-rights and anti-abortion positions, according the Pew report.  Catholicism’s firm doctrine also extends to teachings on contraception, women in the priesthood, celibacy, clerical marriage and homosexuality.

“Those kinds of things are hard for modern (Catholics) to justify,”  said McClory, author of “As It was in the Beginning: The Coming Democratization of the Catholic Church."

Catholics who find the church’s teachings too strict are likely to switch to Episcopalianism, Protestantism or even Buddhism, he said, but they are unlikely to make a switch to something like Islam. 

Lobdell said more Americans are willing to live their lives in conflict with their own church’s teachings.  He calls these people “cultural Christians.”

“They like going to church, but if you ask them if they believe in the gospel,” he said, “by their actions they don’t.”

According to the survey, the unaffiliated group has seen the greatest increase in members. “Unaffiliated” includes atheists, agnostics and spiritual people who identify with no particular religious tradition.  About a quarter of 18- to 29-year-olds belong to this group.

Lobdell said atheism is on the rise because more people have the courage to come out.  “A lot of  atheists before now stayed in the closet,” he said.

Modern Americans tend to “go shopping” for the right religion, Lobdell said.  “I think a lot of times they’re trying to find some kind of magic place that’s going to make them feel better.”

McClory said there has been a “revolution in thinking” recently.

“The level of education is such that people are exposed to different views ... that challenge the way people think about (religion),” he said. “When I was growing up, the vast majority of people followed the religion of their parents and never thought twice about it.”

Today’s increased diversity has resulted in “mingling with people of other religions,” he said, and exposure to new ideas gives people greater freedom to think independently.

“Most of the people (surveyed) who decided to leave their childhood faith did so by the age of 24,” said Allison Pond, research associate with the Pew Forum.”  Most made the change in their teenage or college years.

Ellen Price, assistant director of Baha'i's North American office of communications, said she began to think about her religious options in college.

She was born into the Episcopal Church.  Her parents sang in the choir, and she reluctantly went to church every Sunday. 

“In college is where I started meeting people who were of different beliefs other than myself, and I started to question whether (my religion) was really the only path,” she said. 

It wasn’t until Price was about 25 that she was introduced to the Baha'i faith.

While some religions are struggling, the Baha'i faith is seeing a great increase in membership. The religion has about 165,000 members in North America and welcomed 4,300 members in the U.S. in the past year.  Its sole North American temple is in Wilmette.

While some people are born into the faith, the overwhelming majority comes from other religions, including Christianity, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam and Judaism. 

The faith believes that religions are not designed to contradict one another.   It blends many religions and stresses equality of men and women and harmony between religion and science.

“The more I learned, the more I realized that the teachings of  Bahá’í were what I already believed in my heart to be true, which is that there is one God and that all the religions are worshipping that same God,” she said. “I just didn’t know that there was a religion out there that taught that.”