Apostasy is the formal disaffiliation from, abandonment of, or renunciation of a religion by a person. It can also be defined within the broader context of embracing an opinion that is contrary to one's previous religious beliefs. One who undertakes apostasy is known as an apostate. Undertaking apostasy is called apostatizing. The term apostasy is used by sociologists to mean the renunciation and criticism of, or opposition to, a person's former religion, in a technical sense, with no pejorative connotation.
Christianity in Iran dates back to the early years of the religion during the time of Jesus. Through this time the Christian faith has always been followed by a minority of the population of Iran under its different state religions: Zoroastrianism in historical Persia, followed by Sunni Islam in the Middle Ages after the Arab conquest, then Shia Islam since the Safavid conversion of the 15th century. However, Christians comprised a larger share of the population in the past than they do today. Iranian Christians have played a significant part in the historical Christian mission: currently, there are at least 600 churches and 300,000–370,000 converts.
The persecution of Christians from 1989 to the present is part of a global pattern of religious persecution. In this era, the persecution of Christians is taking place in Africa, the Americas, Europe, Asia and the Middle East.
The Catholic Church in Indonesia is part of the worldwide Catholic Church, under the spiritual leadership of the pope in Rome. Catholicism is one of the six approved religions in Indonesia, the others being Islam, Protestantism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. According to official figures, Catholics made up 3.12 percent of the population in 2018. The number of Catholics is, therefore, more than 8.3 million. Indonesia is primarily Muslim, but Catholicism is the dominant faith in certain areas of the country.
Christians in Morocco constitute less than 1% of the country's population of 33,600,000. Most of the Christian adherents are Catholic and Protestants.
Christianity in Sudan has a long and rich history, dating back to the early centuries of the Christian era. Ancient Nubia was reached by Coptic Christianity by the 1st century. The Coptic Church was later influenced by Greek Christianity, particularly during the Byzantine era. From the 7th century, the Christian Nubian kingdoms were threatened by the Islamic expansion, but the southernmost of these kingdoms, Alodia, survived until 1504.
Several different religions are practised in Indonesia. Indonesia is officially a presidential republic and a unitary state without an established state religion. The first principle of Indonesia's philosophical foundation, Pancasila, requires its citizens to state the belief in "the one and almighty God". Although, as explained by the Constitutional Court, this first sila of Pancasila is an explicit recognition of divine substances and meant as a principle on how to live together in a religiously diverse society. Blasphemy is a punishable offence and the Indonesian government has a discriminatory attitude towards its numerous tribal religions, atheist and agnostic citizens. In addition, the Aceh province officially applies Sharia law and is notorious for its discriminatory practices towards religious and sexual minorities.
Forced conversion is the adoption of a religion or irreligion under duress. Someone who has been forced to convert to a different religion or irreligion may continue, covertly, to adhere to the beliefs and practices which were originally held, while outwardly behaving as a convert. Crypto-Jews, Crypto-Christians, Crypto-Muslims and Crypto-Pagans are historical examples of the latter.
Growth of religion involves the spread of individual religions and the increase in the numbers of religious adherents around the world. In sociology, desecularization is the proliferation or growth of religion, most commonly after a period of previous secularization. Statistics commonly measure the absolute number of adherents, the percentage of the absolute growth per-year, and the growth of converts in the world.
Christianity is Indonesia's second-largest religion, after Islam. Indonesia also has the second-largest Christian population in Southeast Asia after the Philippines, the largest Protestant population in Southeast Asia, and the third-largest Christian population in Asia after the Philippines and China. Indonesia also has the second-largest Christian population in the Muslim world, after Nigeria, followed by Egypt. Indonesia's 29.4 million Christians constituted 10.47% of the country's population in 2023, with 7.41% Protestant and 3.06% Catholic. Some provinces in Indonesia are majority Christian. In Indonesia, the word Kristen refers to Protestantism, while Catholicism is referred to as Katolik. In the 21st century the rate of growth and spread of Christianity has increased, especially among the Chinese minority.
Protestantism is one of the six approved religions in Indonesia, the others being Islam, Roman Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. It constitutes the bulk of Christianity in Indonesia, which is the second largest religion in the country after Islam.
Christianity in Asia has its roots in the very inception of Christianity, which originated from the life and teachings of Jesus in 1st-century Roman Judea. Christianity then spread through the missionary work of his apostles, first in the Levant and taking roots in the major cities such as Jerusalem and Antioch. According to tradition, further eastward expansion occurred via the preaching of Thomas the Apostle, who established Christianity in the Parthian Empire (Iran) and India. The very First Ecumenical Council was held in the city of Nicaea in Asia Minor (325). The first nations to adopt Christianity as a state religion were Armenia in 301 and Georgia in 327. By the 4th century, Christianity became the dominant religion in all Asian provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Christian population growth is the population growth of the global Christian community. According to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey, there were more than 2.2 billion Christians around the world in 2010, more than three times as many as the 600 million recorded in 1910. However, this rate of growth is slower than the overall population growth over the same time period. In 2020, Pew estimated the number of Christians worldwide to be around 2.38 billion. According to various scholars and sources, high birth rates and conversions in the Global South were cited as the reasons for the Christian population growth. In 2023, it was reported: "There will be over 2.38 billion Christians worldwide by the middle of 2023 and around 2.9 billion by 2050, according to a report published by Pew Pew research centre.
The main religion in Morocco is Sunni Islam, which is also the state religion of the country. Officially, 99% of the population are Muslim, and virtually all of those are Sunni. The second-largest religion in the country is Christianity, but most Christians in Morocco are foreigners. There is a community of the Baháʼí Faith. Only a fraction of the former number of Maghrebi Jews have remained in the country, many having moved to Israel.
Youcef Nadarkhani is an Iranian Christian pastor who was sentenced to death in Tehran as being a Christian having been born into Islam.
The situation for apostates from Islam varies markedly between Muslim-minority and Muslim-majority regions. In Muslim-minority countries, "any violence against those who abandon Islam is already illegal". But in some Muslim-majority countries, religious violence is "institutionalised", and "hundreds and thousands of closet apostates" live in fear of violence and are compelled to live lives of "extreme duplicity and mental stress."
It estimated the Afghan Christian community ranges from 500 to 8,000 people. For all practical purposes, there are no native Afghan Christians; they are all converts from Islam who worship in secret to avoid being killed for apostasy..
Reports of widespread conversions of Muslims to Christianity come from regions as disparate as Algeria, Albania, Syria, and Kurdistan.
Since 2000, thousands of Algerian Muslims have put their faith in Christ. Algerian officials estimate the number of Christians at 50,000, but others say it could be twice that number.
there is an estimated 20,000 to 100,000 evangelical Christians in Algeria, who practice their faith in mainly unregistered churches in the Kabyle region
According to Iranian sources in Baku, Western "religious front associations" have converted some 5,000 Azerbaijanis to various Christian evangelical denominations since 1991
the 1990s these front organizations succeeded in converting some 5,000 Azeris to various Christian evangelical
In the last thirty years, there has been an increase in the number of Muslims converting to Christianity. According to one estimate, in the period between 1971 and 1991, the number of Christian converts in Bangladesh has risen from two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand..
it is estimated that as many as 91,000 Muslims across Bangladesh have converted to Christianity in the last six years.
Numerous cases of conversion from Islam to Orthodox Christianity are just one of the ways to express the changes in the fluid identity of Bulgarian Muslims ("Pomaks") in Bulgaria after 1990
more than 20,000 Abkhazian Muslims converted to Christianity
Thousands of refugees in Germany are converting from Islam to Christianity, although it could carry a huge personal risk for them. Independent churches are especially seeing many new converts.
Over 20,000 Kashmiri Muslims are reported to have converted to Christianity since the inception of militancy in 1990.
Open Doors, interviewed by the UK Home Office on 8 August 2017, stated that many converts do not publicly report their faith due to persecution, so it is difficult to record the exact numbers of Iranian Christian converts. Open Doors believes the number to be 800,000, although this is a conservative estimate. Other estimates put the number between 400,000-500,000 this number is not accurate at all right up to 3 million... A March 2019 US Congressional Research Service report on Iran put the 300,000
Conservative estimates place the number of Christians in Iran between 500,000 to 800,000 believers, but others claim there are more than one million. Traditionally, Christian families amount to around 250,000, while the remainder consists of converts from Islam. Most converts from Islam belong to the underground Protestant house-church movement, which Iran considers to be illegal. Meanwhile, according to Islamic and Iranian law, conversion from Islam is a capital offense.
Today it is possible to speak of thousand of Kyrgyz and Kazakhs converted to Protestantism. This new phenomenon has clashed with the common belief that all native people must be Muslim
Harussani Zakaria, publicly fulminated that up to 260,000 Muslims in Malaysia had left the faith and converted to Christianity
. In all an estimated 40,000 Moroccans have converted to Christianity
Converted Moroccans — most of them secret worshippers, of whom there are estimated to be anywhere between 5,000 and 40,000 —
In the Netherlands, thousands of Iranian Muslim migrants and refugees are converting to Christianity, despite conversion from Islam being considered apostasy in Iran and punishable by death.
Given the sensitivity of religious conversion in Singapore, reliable data about religious conversions of ethnic groups is almost non-existent. Some Muslim organizations that deal with conversion and problems of Muslim converts, however, estimated that about 100 Malays converted to Christianity within the last decade or so.
In 2016, the government estimated the number of Christian converts at up to 3,000 persons.
More tangibly, figures published in January 2004 in Turkey's mainstream Milliyet newspaper claimed that 35,000 Muslims, the vast majority of them in Istanbul, had converted to Christianity in 2003. While impossible to confirm (the Turkish government does not release these figures), the rate of conversion, according to Christian leaders in Turkey, is on the rise.
The estimated number of Protestants in Turkey is 4,000–6,000, most of whom live in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir. Protestantism has been a part of Turkey's history for 200 years, first spreading among the non-Muslim minorities. Conversion from Islam to Protestantism was very rare until the 1960s, but Muslim converts currently constitute the majority of Protestants..
There is no space to elaborate here, but the research carried out by Spellman (2004b) and Miller (2014) sheds light on the growth of Iranian Muslim conversion to born-again Christianity in England and Scotland
Leo Africanus (following his capture by Christians and forced conversion to Christianity
We know that many of the Moriscos were well acculturated to Christian ways after conversion and pretended to be sincere Roman Catholics.
Soon afterwards, the Shihabi amirs converted to Christianity and identified with the Maronite community.
turning point in the history of the Shihabis when the Amir Ali al - Shihabi became converted to Christianity and joined the Maronite Church.
at age 22 converted to Christianity from Islam
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: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link).October 20, 1976: Bokassa announces his conversion to Islam ... December 4, 1976: ... Bokassa renounces Islam
The ace up Gadhaffi's sleeve was his oil money. ... Bokassa, of course, was rewarded more than all the others, collecting a cheque for one million U.S. dollars.
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: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)He was absolved by the Pope for his conversion, which he reversed
For instance, Richmond upon Thames councillor Munira Hassam converted to Christianity from Islam eight years ago; hence is not included in the dataset.