Almost nobody who leaves a religion calls themselves an apostate
Apostasy comes from a Greek word for defection or revolt, and it names the formal abandonment of a faith. The label carries such a negative charge that few former believers apply it to themselves. Sociologists have spent decades separating the apostate from quieter leavers and from whistle-blowers.
At its simplest, apostasy means renouncing one's religion or adopting views that contradict earlier beliefs. The word also stretches metaphorically to deserting a political party, a movement or even a sports team, and within the Catholic Church it has described priests or monks who give up clerical or monastic life while staying in the faith.
The consequences can be severe. Some religious groups and some states penalise people who leave, whether as formal policy or through members acting on their own, with measures ranging from shunning and excommunication to abuse, violence and execution. Criminalisation is old: in the third century AD the Sasanian Empire made abandoning Zoroastrianism an offence, and the high priest Kidir drove persecution of Jews, Christians, Buddhists and others to strengthen the state religion.
Sociologists have tried to pin the idea down. Lewis Coser, following Max Scheler, described the apostate as someone whose new life revolves less around fresh beliefs than around fighting the old ones. David Bromley distinguished three exit roles. A defector negotiates departure with the group's own leaders, who manage the process. A whistle-blower teams up with an outside regulator to testify about specific disputed practices. The apostate, by contrast, switches loyalty wholesale in a polarised conflict, joining an opposing coalition without the group's consent and portraying the former organisation as fundamentally evil. Stuart Wright similarly treats apostasy as a distinct kind of defection, marked by public campaigning against the old community.
International human rights bodies take a different view of leaving faith. United Nations human rights experts hold that the freedom to have or adopt a religion necessarily includes the right to swap one belief for another or to become an atheist, and that Article 18.2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights forbids coercion that would impair that choice.
Source: Apostasy
