Disbelief, Disengagement, Discontinuance, and Disaffiliation: An Integrative Framework for the Study of Religious Deidentification

Religion offers a powerful social identity. However, religious change is common across the lifespan, including some who leave religion altogether. Research on leaving religion has mostly been fragmented and failed to embrace a unified theory that captures the breadth of the extant research and appreciates the crucial nuances revealed by empirical findings. Toward that end, we adopt Saroglou's (2011) classification of four dimensions of religiousness to introduce a conceptual model to explain the varieties of different research strands that have examined those leaving religion and integrate them into a unified theory of religious change. We explain how religious deidentification describes how one no longer identifies as religious, and this process can occur via disbelief, disengagement, discontinuance, and disaffiliation. We contend that religious and spiritual struggles are potential pathways by which deidentification may occur. Finally, we situate the work on religious deidentification among other related constructs and provide a brief framework for future research on the nonreligious experience.