Abstract
Leaving religion is a profoundly emotional process that is experienced and expressed in various ways. Those labelled as ‘apostates’ (individuals who leave a religion) in societies with restrictions on blasphemy and/or apostasy undergo a particularly unique experience, yet their accounts remain absent in research on non-religion and forced migration. This paper aims to address this gap by foregrounding the role of emotion across three stages of the refugee journey: leaving a religion in societies with restrictions on Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB), the challenges in proving apostasy during Refugee Status Determination (RSD) procedures, and the dynamics of belonging, identity, and recognition after asylum. Drawing on qualitative analysis of international human rights law, Home Office asylum policies, and interviews with both individuals with lived experience of seeking asylum in the UK (n = 12) and human rights advocates (n = 22), this study shows how fear, grief and relief shape (non-)religious identity construction. The findings suggest that these emotional dynamics, coupled with complex identity reconstructions, create inherent risks for successful bureaucratic recognition. By exploring these affective dimensions, this paper offers insights into how non-religious refugees construct their identities and the shortcomings of RSD processes for claims of apostasy. These findings connect the fields of non-religion and forced migration, which are often treated as separate, to deepen scholarly understanding of the process of becoming non-religious. In doing so, it emphasises the need for asylum systems to better engage with the lived realities of apostasy.