Pastor "tries on" atheism for a year, is promptly fired by his Christian employers.

[Angrboda]

It would be a derail. But it has to do with the level of cognitive dissonance you are willing to tolerate in your belief system and that is a "user serviceable variable"

I always thought of belief as binary either 1 there is a god or 0 there isn't.
I really can't see the shades of grey here.

Belief would appear to be more complex than this. If I ask you, do you believe that there is not a blue whale inside the room with you, you'd likely reply that, yes, you believe there is not a blue whale in the room. This is a belief, but was it 0 or 1 before I asked the question. It was neither. It was a tacit belief. You might say that it follows from your other beliefs, but that's not the same thing, and most of the beliefs it follows from ("I don't see a blue whale" "I am alone" "the room doesn't contain any unusual items") are also themselves tacit beliefs. Many people, when surveyed, will describe themselves as non-religious, yet not atheist. Are they 0's or 1's, or some more complex thing?

Tacit beliefs are not stored in a representational, mental format, but rather, are spontaneously formed or assented to in particular situations. Dennett gives somewhere the example that most of us would spontaneously agree that 'zebras don't wear overcoats in the wild', although few have had this stored as a mental representation. More formally phrased, we can say that an agent S occurrently believes p iff she has a mental representation of p. By contrast, S tacitly believes p iff S spontaneously and reliably forms p in a specific situation or context, but prior to this, S did not have p stored as a mental representation.

One common atheist position is that, "I don't deny the existence of a god, I deny the existence of the gods that have been proposed to me." This would seem to be an atheist position consisting almost entirely of tacit beliefs, that they don't disbelieve specific gods until the question is explicitly raised.