Ecclesiological Investigations will be present at the annual meeting of the European Academy of Religion (EUARE) in Vienna, Austria, from July 8-12, 2025. The panel we plan to organize there, titled “Deconversion and Religious Belonging,” will explore the nature of deconversion which can be interpreted as both turning away and turning towards (i.e. deeper conversion) as an exercise of agency. One important feature of ‘deconversion’ may be a decision to leave or pull back from active association with a religious institution or a traditional faith community. How does disaffiliation function to critique or challenge religious organizations? What role does the abuse and exercise of power, especially institutional power, play in the process of deconversion? How might one consider the distinction between rejecting an institution and relinquishing a religious identity altogether?
Likewise, alternative sources of community, solidarity, and spiritual meaning may be significant pull factors that facilitate religious change. Where are people going and why are they drawn there? Following deconversion, in what ways, if any, do religious traditions still shape an individual’s idea of “authentic community”? This panel seeks papers that advance our understanding of what changes and what remains the same, or even intensifies, when people find the freedom to redefine their religious belonging and turn to spiritual practices they experience as more lifegiving?
Structure
2 hours ; 5 panelists (2 open slots for which you can submit your proposal)
Panel proponent(s)
Cristina Lledo Gomez, The Australian Institute of Theological Education, Australia
Chair
Vladimir Latinovic, University of Tübingen, Germany
Panelists
1. Leny Mendoza Strobel, Center for Babaylan Studies, California, USA.
Title: “Drawn away, drawn towards: Exploring ‘deconversion’ as a Filipina-American migrant settler”
Panelist’s description: I have been contemplating on this concept of “deconversion” for more than a decade. As someone who has been part of a study conducted a few years ago by a Harvard Divinity graduate student surveying younger generations leaving church institutions, as one who has facilitated many conversations in the Filipino-American diasporic community about the struggles of young people in trying to decolonize their Catholic (and Protestant) faith, and as someone who hasn’t found a place (church/institution) in my own personal spiritual practice, one conclusion I have made is that ‘deconversion’ is a search which can lead to interconnections or interrelations between different forms of spiritual practices. These spiritual practices themselves are derived from long standing traditions but are reinterpreted for contemporary contexts, seeking to name the unnameable emerging belief or an emergent spirituality for contemporary contexts. My intellectual thought on this is influenced by the thought and interaction with decolonizing theorists, American indigenous and Filipino indigenous, and decolonizing-reindigenizing Filipino-Americans at the Centre for Babaylan Studies.
2. James W. Perkinson, Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit, MI, USA
Title: “De-Conversion and Re-Conversion: From Christian Supremacy Back to Earth-Taught Mutuality”
Panelist’s description: De-conversion in this paper will be explored in a confessional mode on the part of a white Euro-settler evangelical/charismatic Christian colonist, living for more than 40 years in eastside inner city Detroit, gradually undergoing an initiatory re-arrangement of molecules and motor-muscle memory—much less spiritual ideas and faith commitments—under tutelage to low income black folk, and later on a Filipina partner and various Native American teachers. Today, my commitments are overwhelmingly oriented in the direction of “indigenous” (land-taught) spiritual practice and priorities, informed by Black liberation theology and hip-hop poetry, Babaylan healing wisdom and Celtic cairn cosmology and mythology—all without leaving behind either Christian commitment or continuous re-reading of biblical texts in pushing back on imperial Roman warping of the original Galilean “back-to-land” movement of Jesus and John or the Euro-colonialist perversion of the same in the direction of Native genocide and African enslavement. Deconversion in my case is actually a creative venture of re-conversion: a matter of “crossing over” to indigenous traditions and communities here, in the Philippines, and back in pre-Christian/pre-imperial (pagan) Europe, learning from extant traditions of living close to the land in those places and their own terms and then “coming back” over to mainstream, biblical Christianity. Deconversion in this mode is not abstract, individualist, and socially mediated, by rather informed by deep grief, inchoate longing to be “earthed,” and a growing certainty that our species presumption of being supreme among life forms on the planet and thus unrestrained in our extraction, exploitation, and discard as garbage, of any and every other creaturely reality (plant, animal, water, metal, mineral, air, fossil, etc.) is profoundly geocidal and in dire need of being taught and converted by the ways of living of most of our indigenous ancestry.
3. S. Lily Mendoza, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA
Title: Changing “Mothers”: From Christian Born-Again Conversion to Indigenous Rebirth and Resurrection
Panelist’s description: As a Filipina whose first moment of conversion to born-again evangelicalism brought about a radical rearrangement of desire and life’s purpose, I found it inconceivable to imagine that one day, I could ever undergo another conversion that would even more radical, upending all I had previously embraced as the Totality of life’s Truth (with double capital Ts) up till then. The catalyst for that second de-conversion/re-conversion experience came unbidden: a life-transforming, epiphanic (!) encounter with indigenous beauty facilitated through an ethnomusicology professor’s tutelage in graduate school)—a conversion unlanguaged except through tearful, bodily response to dizzying color, rhythm, movement, visual design, and a very different way of being in the world. This paper will map an understanding of this new radicalizing root-trajectory as portending another rebirth, this time, from a different Mother: the Wild Earth Herself, from whence, I was to learn, that indigenous beauty that hailed me into a new form of subjectivity ultimately came. The theoretical unpacking and gradual “composting” of the hidden civilizational logic hiding inside of what I now understand as imperial Christianity—mis-recognizing indigenous subjectivity as “primitive, uncouth, savage, etc.” and one that must be left behind if one were to become a true child of God and a worthy human being—will constitute the paper’s primary thematic.
If you are interested in being a part of this engaging panel, we invite you to submit a paper proposal. To do so, please visit the following page and submit your proposal:
https://www.europeanacademyofreligion.org/proposal-submission-2025
We look forward to your insights and contributions
