Apostasy, Deconversion and Collective Religious Memories: Religious Faith in the Context of Religious Disaffiliation

This paper will examine the impact religious memories have on collective and individual identity formation in the context of religious disaffiliation.  Through a series of apostasy and deconversion narratives from former Muslims, I will examine how religion – in this case Islam – is remembered, and the influence of such religious memories, even when religion is abandoned. What impact has collective and individual religious memories in apostasy and deconversion processes, and what role plays religious memories for religious defectors?

This paper tackles questions about how Islam is understood and represented in apostasy and deconversion narratives by making use of contemporary theories about collective and cultural memory. From such a point of view, religious disaffiliation is not primarily about religious amnesia. It could rather be understood as a, more or less far-reaching, reformulation of religious memories. I will discuss theories about ‘emblematic’ and ‘loose’ memories, as well as concepts of power and authority, especially when focusing on how hegemonic memories are at work in the exclusion, erasure and silencing of non-hegemonic memories.