Narrative and Autobiographical Approaches to Leaving Religion

Abstract

People leave religious institutions or change their religious beliefs for many different reasons. A person might change their religious affiliation because a political transformation has rendered that affiliation dangerous or economically undesirable; there may be some form of coercion involved. For example, the colonisation process with its attendant Christian missionisation entailed a massive replacement, on several continents, of indigenous religions with some version of Christianity. Did the people who abandoned indigenous religions deconvert? Of course, this is but one of many possible scenarios of religious change. A person might gradually abandon the faith in which they were raised, or might encounter a religious tradition that for one reason or another seems extraordinarily compelling, and for that reason leave her old faith for a new one. Whether all of these phenomena should be considered instances of deconversion is by no means resolved. Furthermore, the similarity between such instances of leaving religion may be only superficial, and thus a single theoretical framework—a single general explanation for all of these cases—may not be possible. For these reasons, writing coherently about leaving religion requires one to specify which sort of leaving is being explained. In most of the literature on leaving religion, the phenomenon is studied in the context of the contested ideological situations in contemporary societies (although important exceptions are found in Part 1 and 2 of this book). As Gooren (2011) notes, in practice the study of deconversion was shaped by its origins in the context of sociological study of new religious movements that arose in the early 1970s. Since that time the purview of the topic has expanded considerably, but it is fair to note that to some extent the concerns of these early studies established the paradigm in this literature. Above all—and Gooren’s (2010) thorough review and synthesis of the literature on conversion and disaffiliation makes this clear—across several