Backslide

Heard in the wild

The longer version

What it means

Backsliding is the slow slide away from faith: the person who used to pray, attend, and care, and who over months or years stopped — not with a dramatic renunciation but by drifting. They may still call themselves Christian; they may not. The word implies that they were sincerely committed once and have moved backward from where they were. It's usually used about a phase ("he backslid in his twenties") rather than a permanent state, because the expectation is that people come back.

Why people say it

The word names something churches see constantly: people leave. It also makes a claim — that the leaving is a slide, a loss of ground, not a neutral choice — and it holds the door open, since a slide can be reversed. For Christians raised in the tradition, it's the word their parents used, sometimes about them.

How to respond

If someone tells you they've been backsliding, they're confessing, and they expect either judgment or grace. Give grace: "What's been going on?" beats any comment about church attendance. If a Christian describes someone else as a backslider, note that it's a label from outside; the person being described might say "I had questions" or "I got hurt" or "I just stopped." Those are also true.

If you hear it in different churches

Evangelical, Baptist, Pentecostal, and Methodist mostly — traditions with a strong sense of personal conversion, where drifting from that is visible. Reformed Christians, who hold that true believers persevere, prefer to say someone is "struggling" or question whether they were converted at all. Catholics and Orthodox say "lapsed" or "fallen away," and Catholics have a formal category for it. Mainline Protestants rarely use the word.

Where does “Backslide” come from?

"Backsliding" is King James English for the Hebrew meshubah, turning away, in the prophets: "Return, you backsliding children" (Jeremiah 3:22) and "I will heal their backsliding" (Hosea 14:4). Proverbs 14:14 speaks of "the backslider in heart." The word entered everyday church vocabulary through Puritan and Methodist preaching; John Wesley wrote specifically about backsliders and their recovery, and Methodist and Holiness revivalism of the 1800s made "backslider" a standard category, with special appeals to the backslidden at camp meetings.

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