The 'new' minority? How atheists leaving conservative religion navigate life after control
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash
By Anna Freeman
The first part of our week-long religion and spirituality series examines the crises of faith among some young people in strict religions.
Turning against your family and friends' religious values often comes at a high price, but the internet is helping young people come to terms with their atheism
‘I told myself that being gay was a test, that out of everyone Allah had chosen me for this test,’ says Aabad*, who was brought up as Sunni Muslim in Morocco, and then in France after his family emigrated. He realised he was gay at the age of eight, and knew a tough road lay ahead. Being openly gay was not an option. Aabad’s attraction to the same sex started a spiral of depression, isolation and a crisis of faith, leading to one suicide attempt in his late teenage years. ‘I started to understand that all my praying amounted to nothing. I gradually lost my faith. Not a soul knows I am gay, because my family and friends say gay people should be cured, imprisoned or killed. I’m lonely; I have nobody to talk to.’
Aabad’s struggle to reconcile his previous faith with his sexuality speaks to a bigger question about conservative religion’s compatibility with younger generations. Social movements such as LGBTQ activism and feminism can now reach nearly every crevice of the world through the internet and social media. In Aabad’s case, coming to terms with his homosexuality turned him away from fundamental Islam because its teachings ‘demonised’ his identity. ‘I have a lot of friends, but everyone is homophobic,’ he explains, ‘I see straight people kissing casually, and I feel so envious of the simple thing they get to do. I had to go to medical school to buy me time so no one would get suspicious that I haven’t married yet. Some people know I am atheist, but they think it’s a phase. Nobody wants to believe ex-Muslims actually exist.’
The subject of apostasy - or abandonment of religion - is gaining more visibility in the internet age. Simply scrolling through Facebook, Twitter and Reddit throws up dozens of pages dedicated to ex-believers. Ismat*, a 20-year-old atheist from a fundamentalist Sunni Muslim family in Indonesia, co-runs a public Facebook page called “Ex-Muslim Atheist”, which has nearly 10,000 followers. Ismat says the persecution of identifying as ex-Muslim has led him to live out a kind of double life: his public life as a pretending devotee of Islam, and his online life as an ex-Muslim campaigner. ‘I have to hide my atheism because I will either be shunned by my family, be sent to an Islamic school, or worst-case scenario be put in prison,’ he says, ‘You have to make a hard choice: be true to who you are and lose everything, or stay in the faith and live a lie.’
