“Some days Iʼm an Atheist and Other Days Iʼm a Believer”: Variations of Ambivalence among Disaffiliates from Norwegian High-Cost Charismatic Christianity

This article explores disaffiliation experiences of 16 Norwegian ex-charismatics. I present data that show that binaries of religion and non-religion miss large parts of the disaffiliation experiences of the informants. Through focusing on variations of ambivalence among the informants, this article shows the need for further developing nuanced and precise understandings of the spaces between religion and non-religion. Using life-story interviews the article explores the relationship between the personal and social aspects of non/religious identities. The informants were men and women, between 20 and 50 years old, living in or near larger Norwegian cities. The data will be presented using five types of ambivalence that emerged during analysis, namely categorization ambivalence, epistemic ambivalence, embodied ambivalence, altruistic ambivalence, and performative ambivalence.