At the Crossroads of Religious Belonging and Leaving: Understanding Religious Disaffiliation in the Philippines

Although religious disaffiliation has received increasing scholarly attention in Western contexts, little is known about how it is experienced in the Philippines. Using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), this study explored the lived experiences of 15 purposively selected participants through semi-structured online interviews. Analysis yielded one overarching meaning unit—finding oneself within a religious lifeworld—expressed through three interconnected experiential processes: moving from certainty to questioning, negotiating disaffiliation within a shared cultural world, and reimagining one's relationship to faith. The findings reveal religious disaffiliation as a dynamic process of identity reconstruction, relational negotiation, and existential meaning-making rather than a simple rejection of religion. Unlike many Western religious dones, Filipino participants often maintained enduring spiritual beliefs, strong familial religious ties, and selective participation in culturally significant religious practices despite disengaging from institutional religion. These findings refine and extend current scholarship by demonstrating the culturally distinctive character of religious disaffiliation in the Philippine context and suggest that prevailing theories require contextual adaptation to account for religious change in non-Western societies.