Between October 2022 and May 2023, 60 life stories were collected via life story interviews, in person or online depending on the interviewee’s preference. The participants were 57 women, one man, one agender person and one gender fluid person, aged between 19 and 71. 8 interlocutors identified as lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, gender fluid, queer, agender, asexual and/or complicated. Participants had various religious backgrounds. These included Anglicanism, Catholicism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormon Church, the Greek Orthodox Church, Orthodox Judaism and Pentecostal, Evangelical, Sunni Islamic and Dutch Calvinist Reformed traditions, and the Apostolic Community, the New Apostolic Church and the Worldwide Church of God. The interviews generated biographical narratives, investigated via a life story analysis. The researcher attended public events that discuss religious exit in order to gain insights into the issues women leaving religion deal with, and the discourses in which the experience of leaving religion is embedded. In addition, cultural narratives about women leaving religion in media and arts were explored to arrive at further insights into existing discourses about and tropes in stories of religious exit, gender and sexuality. The project found that women find it hard to leave their religious communities. Religious exit sometimes includes a faith struggle. Women often lose social relationships as a result of religious exit and need the support of new networks and friends to rebuild their lives. Women and non-binary persons regularly negotiate ideas about sexuality, motherhood and marriage, heterosexist structures that exclude LGBTQI+ identities and experiences, and racisms within and beyond their communities. The concepts of embodiment, intersectionality and liminality help in understanding their situation and trajectories of change. The theoretical, methodological and empirical results of the project were communicated at international conferences, presented in articles forthcoming in international academic peer-reviewed journals, and disseminated in popular outlets for a broader public. Additionally, an online international symposium ‘Gender and Religious Exit: Moving Away from Faith’, co-organised with Sarah-Jane Page (University of Nottingham, UK) and Teija Rantala (University of Turku, Finland), took place on 28 November 2023.
