Increasing atheism, or the view that there is no God, is a major trend affecting the Western religious landscape. Scholarly interest in atheists has grown together with their number, but unanswered questions abound. In this study, we present survey data (N = 758) collected from deconverted and lifelong atheists in four countries (Australia, Finland, Germany, and Norway), and investigate the relationships between deconversion, religious/spiritual identity, and attitudes towards the national religious majority, religious minorities in general, and Muslims in particular. We show that having a religious or spiritual identity is more typical for deconverts than life-long atheists. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the higher religious or spiritual identity among deconverts is associated with more positive attitudes towards different religious groups (national religious majority, religious minorities in general, and Muslims specifically).

In this article, I study how young Finnish Muslims negotiate for agency amidst a multitude of governing discourses—that is, discourses that seek to regulate what is ‘proper’ Finnishness, ‘proper’ Muslimness etc. The study is based on a discourse analysis of theme interviews conducted with 14 young Muslims active in civil society organisations. The analysis demonstrates that the young Muslims are skillful in negotiating their way in the discursive field that surrounds them; by adopting certain subject positions offered to them while at the same time distancing themselves from other positions, my young interviewees create space for increased agency both for themselves and their peers.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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In this paper, I demonstrate how a universalising Muslim identity is constructed in the Facebook prayers of young Finnish Muslims. By analysing the rhetorical devices utilized in the prayer updates, I argue that the prayers serve a function similar to the ‘flagging’ of national identity; the prayers portray the Islamic umma as a unified community and seek to diminish possible counter-discourses that emphasise ethnic divisions among Muslims. This study thus supports earlier observations of a novel ‘umma consciousness’ that is on the rise among young generations of Muslims in Europe.