Navigating Religion, Gender, and Race: Women Leaving Religion in Western Europe

ABSTRACT Women's trajectories of religious exit in Western Europe often negotiate issues of gender and race. Drawing on life story interviews with individuals of diverse Christian and Islamic backgrounds in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, this article discusses the ways in which race, gender, and religion intersect to shape how women make sense of their decisions, processes, and experiences of religious exit. The article shows that an intersectional perspective, operationalized through theories of religion and racialization, is crucial in approaching former Christian women's concerns about racism and coloniality, and former Muslim women's negotiation of the continued perception of them as Muslim. Intersectionality is innovatively merged with the concept of religio‐racial formations to analyze women's narratives as talking about and embedded in gendered structures of religio‐racialization. The article argues for a more sustained incorporation of intersectionality in scholarship on gender and religion through further conceptualizing the religion–race nexus in Europe.